


Sunday Evening 6 p.m.

by Silvergirl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon divergence after S2, First Kiss, First Time, Grief, John Watson is Pretty Damn Smart, Love Confessions, M/M, POV John Watson, POV Sherlock Holmes, Reichenfixit, Reunion, Songfic, The Empty House, post trf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:42:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25293388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvergirl/pseuds/Silvergirl
Summary: Six months after Sherlock jumped, he learns that John is dedicating songs to him on a requests-only radio programme. Is John just working through grief? Or is he—communicating?Fixes the hell out of S3 by pre-empting it altogether. Remember, as TAB told us, John is Pretty Damn Smart.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 567
Kudos: 512
Collections: Sherlock and John Stories that Ease the Soul





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Podfixx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Podfixx/gifts).



> Thank you Podfixx, for the gift of your copious catalogue—which keeps on giving, rereads and all. I'm such a slow writer ⏳ it’s taken me this long to thank you for the years of entertainment and for _Casualty_!

The broadcasts began one month after my death. At least, that’s as far back as I could trace them.

It was six months after my swan dive off the roof that Mycroft told me: someone identified only as John was dedicating songs to “an absent friend,” via a Sunday evening radio programme.

He said I’d know when I heard the songs that it was my John. And by the same token, that the anonymous absent friend was me.

Well, who else? It wasn’t just that I only had one; so far as I could tell, he really only had one as well.

I went back into the programme’s archive and listened.

17 July, 2011: “Sweet Old World,” Lucinda Williams.

Style: country-western stretched sideways, somehow.

Voice: strangely multi-coloured and expressive.

Lyrics: elegiac, addressed to a friend who committed suicide.

I downloaded and listened again, several times in fact. The words were simple, but the images so rich. A pikestaff to the heart.

_“See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world.”_

The scattershot beauties of living, flashes of love.

 _“The pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one /_ _Didn’t you think anyone loved you?”_

Dear God, John. Stop looking inside me. Stop looking. Stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters 1 and 2 post on 24 July; the rest will post each Friday, concluding on 14 August. (Edit: I added a chapter, and posted it on 23 August.) I'm totallysilvergirl on Tumblr, by the way


	2. The Five Stages of Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Sherlock jumps, John lives his own version of the five stages of grief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: This chapter contains references to Sherlock's suicide and its immediate aftermath as depicted in the series.

**June–December 2011**

**1.** **Mourning**

I couldn’t believe he was gone. I couldn’t believe he’d done that to himself. The shattered skull, the sightless eyes. Blood soaking his hair and streaking down his face.

I wished it’d been me who’d died.

All the deaths I’ve seen. All the corpses. Violent deaths, and serene passings. Deaths from carnage, and deaths like sleep. Deaths I’ve fought tooth and nail and scalpel. Deaths I only saw after someone else had done all the fighting.

No death has ever gutted me like this one. Nothing at all, ever, has gutted me like this death.

* * * * *

Or maybe it was more like having my backbone removed. And the bones in my arms and legs. I couldn’t move, that first week. I lived in the sitting-room, inert in my chair and staring at Sherlock’s.

Sometimes I drank. Tea. Whisky. Tea again. Beer. Whisky again. I don’t remember eating. What was brought me I didn’t look at.

All I could see was the broken body on the pavement, the blood-streaked face. His staring eyes.

The images I couldn’t erase, I tried to replace. I looked for photographs of him, alive. The media photos never looked like him, to me, and there were surprisingly few that weren’t media shots. The ones I did find were never clearly focused. Maybe he never stood still long enough.

After a while, I gave up looking. Sat some more. Drank some more. When I slept, there were always nightmares. Sherlock on the pavement. I didn’t have photographs to study, but in the ones in my mind—something was off.

Thinking wasn’t my strong suit that first week or two. I knew only that something wasn’t right, not _what_ wasn’t right. I tried hard to remember what I’d seen and what was nagging at me. Then, I tried to avoid thinking about it. Hoped it would come back on its own if I stopped concentrating on it.

* * * * *

I tried reading. Films. Telly. Poetry. None of that helped. The opposite, actually. Suicide’s everywhere, who knew? Even in bloody opera.

Listened to the radio. Programmes are specific to times of day: the sad and the strange in the dark hours; in the working hours, the frenetic and the cheerful.

There was this one programme on Sunday evenings. Requests only. Once people would have phoned in, I suppose. Now it seemed more like e-mail requests. Most people asked for sad songs, as if they were suffering and wanted to hurt more, not less. Wanted company. World’s a tough place.

“ _I just want you to hurt like I do._ ”

Surprising how many songs were about suicide, somebody else’s, that is. I guess people thinking about killing themselves wouldn’t be in the mood to write songs.

“ _And when no hope was left in sight / on that starry, starry night / you took your life as lovers often do_ ”

Somehow it helped, just a little—knowing it was a thing, this being left behind by someone who offed themselves. Someone dearly loved. I went looking for more music about it. Easy, when you put your search terms into YouTube. Found a whole album, practically, on the first try. “Sweet Old World.” 

“ _Somebody so warm cradled in your arms: / Didn’t you think you were worth anything?_ ”

I sat there in 221B and thought of everything Sherlock had stolen from himself when he jumped. Everywhere my stunned stare landed: something he’d lost. His music. His research. His collection of oddities. Outside the window: his city.

How could the man who thought himself more clever than God think he wasn’t worth anything? Send me away to kill himself?

In a fit of melancholy, what Sherlock would call _sentiment_ , I e-mailed the station and requested they play the song first thing on Sunday evening, 6 p.m. Four weeks and a bit after the day. Gave them my first name, and dedicated the song “to an absent friend.” 

**2\. Anger**

Weeks passed, outside at least. Inside the flat, time had stopped.

Lestrade called a few times, texted a few more. Every time I saw his name on my phone I felt a flush of incandescent rage. I never picked up, never texted back. The bastard _knew_ that Sherlock had not made it all up. Hell, he’d been the beneficiary of Sherlock’s rescues a hundred times, wouldn’t have kept his damn _job_ without them. And still he let Moriarty use him to take Sherlock down. _Fuck_ him.

Mycroft Holmes also had the brass-faced gall to try to reach me. Him, I spoke to. Oh, I spoke to _him_ , all right. Shouted down the line that he’d betrayed his brother, sold him out for his own convenience. Two or three times he tried to interrupt. I just roared louder, didn’t stop to draw breath, told him what he could do with his fake grief and fake solicitude, then ended the call. Fuck him, too. Twice.

Everything I saw reminded me of what Sherlock had taken away with him when he jumped. All the unique, beautiful, infuriating—things about him—that I’d lost when he left me, windmilling and flailing down five stories of empty air to plummet, ruined, to foul the pavement with his blood.

I was angry with _him_ , too.

What he did when he killed himself—it was a betrayal of everything our friendship was. He’d saved my life, I’d saved his. His life wasn’t his own to throw away, anymore. It was mine, as mine was his.

I knew where this rage was coming from. I was so monstrously angry at Sherlock, and at everyone who had failed him, because I’d failed him myself and I could not endure it.

From the first night it’d been my job to protect him. From bad men like Jefferson Hope. From people who mocked him, out of contempt or out of insecurity. From his own worst impulses. From starving himself. From using, from smoking, from living in a germ lab. From Mycroft’s suffocating “worry.” From _Moriarty_. I’d failed, and I hated it. Hated myself for it.

It wasn’t only that, of course; it was textbook progress through the five stages of grief. I’d begun with mourning, and moved into the phase of anger.

Apparently when this began to wane, I’d shift into “bargaining.” Didn’t quite know how this bargaining was supposed to work. God wasn’t real and Sherlock wasn’t there: I had no one to bargain _with_. I had nothing to offer or trade anyway. Whatever I might’ve had to offer, Sherlock had taken away with him.

Everything I’d come to love and count on, Sherlock had taken away with him.

In mid-August I e-mailed the radio programme again and made another request. Four weeks after the first.

**3\. Bargaining**

It eluded me for weeks, what I’d been trying to remember. Sherlock, on the pavement. I’d been hit, knocked unconscious. By a cyclist, they told me. When I came to it was all over, and they barely let me near him.

But I got there anyway, I made them let me by, touched him and felt for a pulse and took his hand and dropped it. Looked and looked, and looked away, but not before that picture had burned itself into my brain.

His body, so symmetrically splayed out on his right side before they rolled him onto his back. His left leg straight, his right bent at the knee. His right arm straight, his left bent at a ninety-degree angle at the elbow, dangling awkwardly from his shoulder.

His coat, even in mid-June. Tidily disposed all the way around, the hem of it reaching his knees not just on top but also beneath him. His coat, not even disarranged.

 _That was it_. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was Sherlock falling horizontally with his arms milling in circles, his legs jerking as if running. The Belstaff was flapping out behind him—black wings, or sails. Was it even physically possible for a body falling horizontal from a building to land _on_ its coat that way?

* * * * *

Over a thick sludge of unnumbered days, I sat there in my chair by the fireplace. I didn’t want to see anyone. Mrs Hudson tried, every day; I just sat silent with earphones on until she would leave her tray of food I couldn’t eat, and go back downstairs.

There was no one I wanted to see. No one who was still alive, at least.

I tried to reconcile Sherlock and suicide. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t accept his own explanation, there on the roof, that he was a fraud: because I knew he wasn’t one.

 _I know you for real_.

I was no Sherlock Holmes, but I decided I had to find the real explanation, the one that _did_ cover all the facts. He wasn’t a fraud, so he didn’t kill himself for being one. Did he kill himself for another reason, then? Or did he even kill himself at all—did someone else force him to jump off that roof?

Perhaps this was my bargaining: I would believe this when I could understand it, and not before. I would accept it, but only if I could figure it out, make sense of the motivation—and the coat.

* * * * *

For a man who’d seen and touched his friend’s fresh corpse, my grieving was bizarrely unconvinced. I mourned, unquestionably. I suffered. I missed Sherlock and not one minute of the days passed without him being at the forefront of my mind.

But I was mourning his absence, not his suicide. Because I was having trouble believing he had done it. 

Well. I knew he was dead. My head knew. My heart didn’t believe he’d killed _himself_. And because my heart didn’t believe it, I decided to go back to examine the evidence.

Not what I’d seen: that was indelibly slashed into my mind, _thank you, Sherlock_. But the documentary evidence. And circumstantial evidence. And eyewitness testimony.

I needed to be systematic, but it took forever to plan my investigation. Thinking was incredibly difficult, like trying to swim through treacle. I felt adrift, unfocused and incapable. Far from a conductor of light. 

At first I tried to organise my enquiries by anomalies and red flags, such as the motive, and the coat, and the bizarre permanence of Sherlock’s bank account. Statements had stopped coming in the post, but all the bills for 221B that were automatically deducted from Sherlock’s account were still being paid that way more than two months after his death.

But that was a persuasive strategy, not an analytical one. It would be a good argument if I were trying to convince someone else that all was not as it appeared in Sherlock’s death. But I wasn’t. I was trying to find out for myself.

Slowly, doggedly, I settled on a method. I’d proceed in chronological order from the death itself. Assemble all the sources and facts I could—excluding Sherlock’s family, especially Mycroft. If anything was being concealed about his death, Mycroft already knew it and hadn’t told me. That meant that he wasn’t going to, and _that_ meant that he would actively try to keep me from learning anything.

I made a list. Couldn’t remember anything without writing it down. Hid the list in a folder I labeled “RAMC files.”

  1. Interview the staff who “helped” me at the scene. Helped keep me from Sherlock.
  2. Interview the cyclist who struck me. (Possible? Were they ever identified? See # 3, police report.)
  3. Get copy of police report.
  4. Get copy of the death certificate and a pathology report, if there was one.
  5. Collect media reports, online and print (Internet, library).
  6. Make enquiries at the Met: Lestrade. Donovan. The repulsive Anderson. Any contacts I had there. About Moriarty, Rich Brook, and about all the cases unraveled by Sherlock’s supposed “fraud.”
  7. Look into Sherlock’s bank account. That could be tricky, as we didn’t share one.
  8. Look into Sherlock’s will. That would be a public record, provided there was one and probate had been needed by his executor.
  9. One last desperate shot I didn’t even want to write down, unless and until numbers one through eight contradicted—or at least failed to absolutely confirm—that Sherlock’s death was a suicide.



Whatever the data turned up, Sherlock was gone. Although I had a purpose, I was still gutted and often near catatonic. Certainly clinically depressed. I’d lost nearly two stone, and had never really had it to lose. Nobody seeing me would imagine I was a man on a mission.

And depending on what I found out had happened to Sherlock and why, it was likely to remain that way.

**4\. Investigation**

I’d spent the first two months taking Sherlock’s death at face value, and it didn’t come naturally to try to see the same scenario from a different point of view. For Sherlock it was a habit of mind to see things in three dimensions—in opposite versions, or at least incompatible ones. To reverse cause and effect, play with how that changed things.

I suspected it might be difficult to position myself differently vis à vis the data the way he seemed to do so effortlessly. But it turned out to be easier than I thought.

My first task was to interview the hospital staff who helped me at the scene. It should have been possible to get a list of those working at Barts A&E that day, who handled the aftermath.

The first time I tried, I had to abort. It wasn’t a full-on panic attack, but returning to the scene put my whole body and brain into adrenal overdrive. I turned back to the cab and got back in before I could scream, or hyperventilate, or faint.

But there was nothing for it: I had to go, and I had to be reasonably self-possessed when I did.

After a few days of bracing myself, I went back to Barts and headed to Scheduling. The brisk woman in that office said she couldn’t help me, as her work had to do with future scheduling, and was confidential in any case. With her I didn’t have to pretend to feel hopeless and lethargic. She sent me to Human Resources.

There too the hospital employee refused to give me a list. Confidential, he said, and bloody cumbersome to collate from the hundreds of employee records. I might’ve given up at that point, but the pallid, reedy bloke helping (“helping”) me slipped up and suggested that the information I needed was likely to be centrally assembled in the office of the hospital’s legal counsel.

At that moment I did have to glance down, conceal a surge of energy. Of course. Legal liability is always a terror at a busy urban hospital, and who was working when and in exactly what unit—that’s information hospitals have to be able to access immediately if a complaint is lodged.

So, off to a third office. Said I was looking to lodge a complaint about rough treatment I’d received at the scene. The youngish lawyerly type said she’d e-mail her colleague in HR a list of the staff working that day and let him handle it according to hospital regulations.

Back to HR, then. There my hangdog demeanour must have brought out some shadow of pity, because while the reedy bloke wouldn’t give me the list, he did check it against current employees. He said, with some surprise, that none of them worked at the hospital anymore, and there were no notes about transfers to other NHS hospitals. None. Not one.

There’d been perhaps a dozen people at the scene; even if there were a few passers-by, I remember seeing lots of medical professionals. They _all_ took jobs elsewhere, in the private sector? Every last one? What were the odds?

Again I had to conceal a rush of—not excitement, exactly, but sharpened focus. I let my shoulders slump and slowed my gait as I left his office.

* * * * *

It took some discipline to wait before beginning my next enquiry. The grief that had brought me to a standstill in the first two months after had paused, or shifted; and I had to conceal that fact. After my tour of Barts’ Many Non-Medical Offices I went ten days without leaving the flat, doing precious little that I can recall beyond searching the internet again for photographs of Sherlock. And listening to music. I kept my i-pod or the radio on constantly, to drown out the silence of his absence.

I hadn’t realised how much art of Sherlock there was out there. How did artists have photos to work from, if I could barely find any? Had someone scrubbed images of him from the web? —Stupid. Why would anyone do that? And who _could_ do it?

Some of the art was so good it caught something of him beyond his striking appearance, something so true that it made my chest tighten, hurt. I scrolled and scrolled, and downloaded and saved, and stared, and studied the images until I knew them by heart. People loved him, and I don’t think he knew that.

I loved him, and I don’t think he knew that.

When I felt I might do so unobtrusively, I went out to acquire the police report on his leap from Barts. Early in September I got dressed (that made a change), and got myself over to the Records Office at the Met. The clerk on duty was sympathetic, moved no doubt by my depressed bearing and three-day beard. I tried to smile—a fleeting and pro-forma excuse for a smile—as I handed over my request form for the police report.

There wasn’t one. At least, that day there wasn’t one. It wasn’t missing, as in out for use or mislaid or misfiled. There was simply no record that there had ever been a report.

Records were identified by a unique reference number made up of date, time, post code, a letter designating an “incident type,” and if necessary, one cardinal number. There was no trace of a police report ever having been generated on a death outside Barts Hospital that day. I told him that was impossible, because I had been interviewed by an officer at the hospital and my statement taken. The records clerk was perplexed and embarrassed, since a quite high-profile death had certainly occurred. He showed me the list of police reports filed in EC1 on 15 June: no “incident” that could have been Sherlock’s suicide.

I left my mobile number. The desk clerk promised to follow up on the “Incident Report,” as he kept calling it. His stare had gone from sympathetic to pitying, when I’d been unable to finish a coherent sentence of thanks. Not a very sincere thanks, since I didn’t expect to hear from him again.

But the next day he did call, saying the report had “turned up.” How could it have turned up, when it hadn’t existed? The clerk emailed me a pdf; I couldn’t see much anomalous about it except that it wasn’t signed. And it made no mention at all of my statement or presence on the scene, let alone of my having been knocked unconscious. So, a dead end for locating and interviewing that cyclist.

Well, at least I had a new word to apply to Sherlock, and could mentally dodge “death” and “suicide.” It was the Incident, now.

On 11 September, almost three months to the day after the Incident, I went online to find another song for Sunday evening, 6 p.m. It took some time to find one that was mournful without being _romantic_ , but browsing through Youtube I stumbled on an old wartime song.

“ _Nights are long since you went away, I dream about you each night and day, my buddy._ ”

A soldier talking to his dead mate—how much closer could you get? Saying the words out loud, no matter how indirectly and no matter to whom, felt better than living in this muted grey round of solitary grief.

* * * * *

My next Easter egg in this weird hunt was the death certificate. Again I let almost two weeks go by, living my solitary life in 221B and trying to look like I had nothing on my mind but surviving day to day. That part wasn’t hard; I _was_ surviving day to day.

Some nights I drank to get to sleep; those were never very good nights, never very good sleep. Some nights I just lay in bed and listened to the radio, trying to lose myself in songs of all kinds. Thumbnail sketches of other people’s lives, other people’s hurt. Some nights I tried to read, but mostly it was my blog I reread, or case notes in Sherlock’s spiky shorthand.

When it was time to get out again and resume investigating, I started with the Camden Council’s Registry Office, the nearest one to Barts Hospital where the death would have been registered. It turned out the registration had been delayed beyond the usual five-day deadline, because there’d been an inquest. Sherlock’s death certificate had been registered by Mycroft almost a month after the Incident, and it showed that the form certifying the cause of death had been signed by Molly Hooper.

I went back to Barts and straight to her lab. I was glad to have a semi-friend to ask this favour of—really wasn’t looking forward to bouncing among different offices again, trying to get bored or cagey employees to bend the rules for me.

Outside was always unnerving: I saw Sherlock everywhere, out of the corner of my eye: in the flat, in the Tube, on the street. Always moving just out of my visual field. But I hadn’t counted on how hard it would be to enter that particular space: the first place I met him and the last place I saw him alive. 

I’d never imagined how paralysing it would be to meet Molly’s sympathetic brown eyes. Which promptly filled with tears, _because of course they did_. Which made me choke up when she hugged me and asked how I was doing.

I told her that I'd seen a copy of the death certificate, which had shown her as signing off the medical certificate. I commiserated how horrible that must have been for her. That made her cry again.

Had there been a post mortem, I asked? She said the coroner had not asked for one, given the cause of death was obviously the fall; there'd only been a visual inventory of injuries. She brought me a photocopy of the medical certificate and the supporting report not five minutes after I asked. I couldn’t read it there and then, but I asked her how the Coroner had decided whether it was an accident or suicide?

“Eyewitness accounts, apparently. I didn’t attend.”

We exchanged an awkward and insincere proposal to meet up for coffee, after which I smiled weakly and said goodbye.

Needless to say, reading the detailed report listing the visual inventory of the injuries was a surreal experience that flattened me again. Stomach-turning and soul-destroying. What hadn’t been broken in Sherlock’s fall would make a shorter list than what had.

When I’d mastered the contents, I added the report to the slender folder of paper evidence, “RAMC files.”

* * * * *

My next step in investigating the Incident was to track down media reports, not on Sherlock’s “fraudulence,” but on his death. It was just as well I could start this at the flat, since after the path report I was too heartsick to go out right away.

In a journalism course I had to take in college it was hammered into us that no two observers would see the same details, or even the same big picture, of a single occurrence. I expected to gather from the news reports a mass of observations, some contradictory and mutually exclusive, to put together into a fuller view of what had happened that hideous day. 

That didn’t happen. Every single media report either republished or adapted the same wire service story. Not one original investigative report to be found. Not even by the criminally culpable Kitty Riley, the so-called investigative journalist who’d written the so-called exposé in _The Sun_. I couldn’t tell whether there never had been an independent story, or whether it had been suppressed somehow—I suspected the former, as there was no trace of, no reference to, any other source. Not in print, not on the web.

How was that even possible? If Sherlock had really killed himself—and here I finally let myself frame this as a contrafactual—the media jackals would have been all over it. I’d been too pole-axed after he died to watch the news or read the papers; but it would have been a feast for vultures. God knows they’d haunted Baker Street for at least a week. And given there'd been an inquest, why had there been no press coverage? Particularly because he was not merely prominent but tarnished by the accusation of fraud.

Government cover-up? Big brother could certainly have arranged that, even if the death had been an actual suicide. Whether for family reasons, or his own political expediency. But it would have been a massive undertaking even for Mycroft.

And if it was not a suicide—was it even a death? 

On 9 October, almost four months after the Incident, I sent the radio programme a request to play “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

* * * * *

I decided to accelerate the pace of my enquiries, being careful to continue my pantomime of mourning. And it had become a pantomime, because somewhere in my ribcage, hope had taken up a tentative residence. It was an irrational hope, much as I tried to contain it within the bounds of rational analysis and concrete investigation; yet it took hold, and grew. And I had to remind myself, whenever I went out, that I was a crushed man, a man with nothing to hope for and little to live for.

It took several days and a few dozen phone calls to establish that literally no one at the Met would talk to me. Not one officer involved in the Rich Brook case or in any of _those_ cases, either. Lestrade was on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into his role in the cases “tainted by Holmes;” so was Donovan. Anderson had resigned just in time not to be fired, apparently. No one on active duty would even speak to me.

And neither Lestrade nor Donovan would speak to me about _that_. When I finally called Lestrade back, after weeks of shouting at the phone whenever his name showed on it—he just sighed and said _sorry, mate, I can’t talk about that. It’s an investigation in progress and my pension’s on the line_. And he confirmed it was no use calling Donovan, because she wasn’t even speaking to _him_.

When he tried changing the subject to how I was doing, I put him off and hung up. _Yes, Graham, it certainly was an investigation in progress. Even if you were too craven to talk to me about it._

I thought briefly about contacting that pillock Anderson, and I probably should have done. But he really repulsed me, and I decided he could wait.

To the bank, I brought one of our internet service invoices showing payment from Sherlock’s account. I struck it lucky: a young, uncertain manager, visibly disconcerted by my shaky hands and disconnected sentences, told me that the account had not been closed or even reassigned. (Seriously? almost five months after a death?) _How odd, Doctor Watson. We’ll look into it. A death certificate needs to be presented to close the account, so perhaps something has held it up. It happens with probate problems._

It went a bit against the grain to look into Sherlock’s will. As though I were hoping to be a legatee or something. But I reminded myself that I cared much more about finding out the truth, than about what anyone might think of me for asking. I knew wills are public documents, but not much about acquiring them. Why are internet searches always so much more cumbersome whenever the government or the law is involved?

All I needed was to find a will, or proof that there wasn’t one (and it would be so like Sherlock to consider it _boring_ to make a will). Did he have an estate? An executor? Heirs? After filling out a twelve-page form, submitting it and waiting for the results, the response came back: no will had been registered for probate purposes. Internet research then showed me that either there was a will that had not needed probate, or there was no will at all.

When someone dies intestate, though, things still happen—yet nothing had. None of his belongings, not even the more valuable things—his violin, his quite pricey scientific equipment—had been removed. I doubted that was out of deference to my feelings. 221B was still set up as though he were going to come back.

As though he were going to come home. 

Confusion about the will meant it was time to recap, see where things stood. Before pulling out the nuclear option.

Five months on, on 6 November, I sent out another song to “an absent friend.” Equally suitable for Sherlock, and for me. Both of us suffered, both needed comfort. In the arms of the angel.

**5\. Denial**

The five stages of grief, say the experts, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. They emphasise that these are not static. Sequence may vary, earlier stages resurface again. Grief is messy, they say. Highly individual.

I can confirm this. I’d known loss before, and trauma, and desperation. I’d thought about killing myself, in the bleakest days after my discharge. And there was no linearity to it, no stable “getting better” (or “getting worse”). When I met Sherlock something jolted me out of the blur of hopelessness and into sharp, clear focus. I never again found myself in the pit of despair until the Incident of 15 June 2011.

After that day I had my own itinerary across the landscape of grief and loss. Also not cleanly sequential; also labile and variable. It started in solitary mourning and acceptance, and made space for anger. But what entered in after was ratiocination, and then investigation, and finally, denial.

My goal had been to collect data. I tried to look at the information I had gleaned (and the lack of information) as neutrally as possible. To avoid confirmation bias: I was vulnerable to that, since I desperately wanted for Sherlock not to have killed himself, for his death to have been stage-managed in some way.

But instead of resolving the anomalies I’d started with, my investigation had turned up new ones. An apparent purge of Barts Accident and Casualty employees in the month after Sherlock’s death. No police report, then an incomplete one hurried into existence and into the records. No post mortem, an inquest that had never been reported. And all the rest of it.

Any one weird circumstance could have had an innocent explanation; two was a stretch. All of them together: what kind of an idiot did he take me for? _Don’t answer that, Sherlock_.

It’s hard to prove a negative. But the repeated failures of my enquiries did establish that there was a startling dearth of positive proof that Sherlock had taken his own life. And that there might be indications that he hadn’t even died.

At first it was hard to know what to do with that. If he hadn’t died, but had gone away voluntarily and left me to mourn—I was going to find him, and then I was going to kill him. Resuscitate him, and kill him again even more creatively and painfully.

On the other hand, if he _had_ gone away voluntarily—there had to have been an overpowering reason for doing that, and for not telling me. It’s not as though he didn’t care about me, or imagined I didn’t care about him. He knew what he meant to me: I’d killed for him, offered to die for him.

The other possibility was more terrifying. Perhaps Sherlock hadn’t been complicit in stage-managing his death at all, but had been taken against his will. But if he had been taken, _and_ he was alive—where had he been taken, by whom, and why? The sheer scope of such an undertaking and subsequent cover-up would have required immense resources, which meant it had Mycroft written all over it. That made this second possibility vanishingly small; still, it had to be considered.

Mycroft. It was time to activate the nuclear option. If Sherlock was dead, and we buried him under that gravestone, I wanted to see the proof.

I opened a fresh search window and typed in “how to apply for an exhumation licence.”

Exhumation requires “the signature of any close relatives, the owner of the grave plot and the burial authority,” so I didn’t expect to get any further with this enquiry than with any of the others. But it was guaranteed to flush Mycroft out of his den.

If Sherlock was alive, and Mycroft knew where he was—he might contact me, to try to discourage my prying, though I thought we’d both find _that_ embarrassing. In any case he would most assuredly contact Sherlock. There was nothing more I could do for now but wait.

* * * * *

The hope was growing, that Sherlock might actually be alive to hear the songs I’d been dedicating to him. It was disorienting, trying to occupy all the spaces of possibility at once: he’d killed himself; he’d been killed; he’d been abducted; he’d left of his own volition. There was only one emotion common to all four: sorrow.

I missed him with a pain as caustic and searing as the day it happened. Whatever I thought about the Incident, what I _felt_ about it demanded relief beyond tears, drinking, self-isolating. Or even my personal version of the five stages of grief.

Whether he was alive or not, I was going to talk to him. Reach out to him. Systematically. The same time, same venue, regular schedule. From John, to an absent friend. Not just every four weeks, either: every second Sunday, 6 p.m. He would figure out I was leaving him a Sunday to answer. He was a very clever man, after all.

In early December, nearly six months after Sherlock flew out of my world and left me all but dead in it, I had the radio programme play him a song that came out of the embryonic hope germinating in my brain: “We’ll Meet Again.”

And whether this meant I was as mad as he was or not—I didn’t know, or care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before S3, many brilliant predicts-it fics were written about how Sherlock’s return would go; after S3, the equally brilliant fix-it fics are still coming out (like _The Lion Goes to Serbia_ by Tindomerelhloni, in progress now!). I can hardly justify adding another, having little new to say about the Fall and the Return. 
> 
> But a quirky plot took hold of me, where John reaches out to Sherlock in his own version of the newspaper agony columns that ACD Holmes perused so assiduously. He is hoping but not completely sure that there is a living Sherlock out there to hear his song requests--because John has applied Sherlock’s methods to the man’s own death. 
> 
> John in BBC canon was a dead man walking when Mary met and revived him. But nothing will ever convince me that that meeting was a coincidence. I decided that when this John couldn’t stand his own thoughts anymore--when he needed to blot out memories and images--he would drown himself in music, and see Ella, and _investigate_. ACD’s “The Empty House” did the rest.
> 
> If you like the result so far, do let me know. If you don’t, you may direct all objections to my brother, who will graciously accept responsibility for the many imperfections of conception and realization in this fic. (He doesn't know this, but it's true nonetheless.) And in fact there were many things to fix in this initially unbeta'ed and unbritpicked chapter, so where I fluffed it big time, it has been corrected and seamlessly smoothed by guardian angel 7PercentSolution who will, I hope, take a bow in the comment box. 
> 
> If you're still reading this long note, recommend one of your favorite fics about the Fall and/or the Return! Oxygen or champagne, your choice.


	3. A to Z

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It took me a humiliatingly long time to identify John’s code. I spent twelve weeks gnawing at the songs as a complex signifying mechanism, perhaps multilingual, that had to be deciphered.
> 
> I went to bed (when I could get to a bed) and woke in the morning (when I could actually sleep) thinking _what is the code?_ All the while pursuing Moriarty’s accomplices, throwing a wrench into the works of his criminal machine, using the law when I could and violence when I had to.

**December 2011–October 2012**

I had spent years deriding sleep. After I left London, sleep took its revenge. 

I couldn’t often afford to sleep, to be unprotected. When I could risk it, sleep often eluded me; I felt literally too tired to fall asleep. And when I did, I often had nightmares. But even a dreamless sleep was fraught: I’d wake with a sickening lurch like the sudden loss of altitude in a plane—unable, in those first seconds, to remember where I was, or why.

Locations, languages, tasks, targets—they changed constantly and too fast. My focus and effectiveness were undiminished in my waking hours; it was my rare and troubled hours of sleep that seemed to wipe my memory clean.

I’ve woken up unable to remember why my hair was so long. Looking about me for my room in Baker Street, unable to make it overlay onto the present surroundings.

And always then the jolt when I remembered where I was, where John was. And that he knew nothing of what I was doing or that I was alive. I didn’t know whether he was grieving or moving on; either one was painful. 

I never wanted to leave him behind, to think me dead. It was, however, the only way to guarantee his life, and fortunately he’s not suspicious enough to doubt the truth of that particular magic trick. Doubting me was a reflex he had never acquired, though for his own sake he should have done.

For my part, if I’d had him with me, I’d have been much better off in every respect but the most important one: he’d have made me vulnerable. At any serious threat to John I’d have backed down before any adversary, in any circumstance. Moriarty had known that, and used it accordingly; I had to suspect that some among his surviving minions knew it too.

My own safety was secondary, or worse. This made me willing to run outrageous risks, face unreasonable dangers: what did I have to lose? Nothing.

But John was only safe so long as Moriarty’s underlings didn’t know I was alive. If they got so much as a whiff of that—John was a dead man there in London, alone and suspecting nothing.

I didn’t trust Mycroft’s efforts at all: he had no investment in John, and very little in me. His people: even worse. They spy on people for money, after all. How trustworthy can they be?

* * * * *

Six months after I jumped, Mycroft contacted me about John.

We had an actual voice conversation, as unpleasant as it was rare. Perhaps even more so.

I was somewhere unpronounceable, doing unspeakable things to unpardonable people in a leaking, freezing structure at the arse-end of the world. The assistants Mycroft had sent had thoroughly failed me, though their brief was to be “language and cultural _experts_.” I forgot his incapable assistants at once. Perhaps his intended effect, as I hadn’t quite finished verbally flaying him about them when he said there was something I needed to know about John.

“For God’s _sake_ , Mycroft, I told you to keep an eye on him. How was he at the inquest?”

“He didn’t attend. I phoned to invite him but he shouted abuse at me and hung up without listening.”

“And you didn’t send a letter? What have you been doing? What has _he_ been doing?”

John, he said, was mostly immured in Baker Street: “He goes out rarely, every week or ten days. When he does, it’s either to go to his therapist’s office, where he says virtually nothing; or to visit your grave; or to try to dig up information about your death. Your _suicide_ , little brother.”

“Dig up, how?”

I could hear him smirking. “Almost literally, I’d say. Certainly systematically. He obtained the death certificate from that pathologist friend of yours. You were so sure he wouldn’t pursue details that I didn’t waste resources building an airtight illusion around them. I believe he’s learned nothing concrete. But he must have gained the sense that concrete information which should be available, is not.”

“And you’ve known about this _pursuit_ for how long?” Whether from the cold or the rage, I spoke through clenched teeth.

“Since August, shortly after he began his investigations.”

Oh God. “You didn’t tell me anything then—so why are you telling me now? What’s changed?” 

“It has been brought to my attention that Doctor Watson has submitted a request for an exhumation of human remains.”

My breath whooshed out as though I’d been gut-punched. “He’s asked to _dig up_ my body.”

“That’s what I said.”

It wasn’t, but that was beside the point. “And you’ve made sure that request was formally declined.”

“Obviously.”

“And John would know you would do that, _and_ that you’d suppress any trace of his request.”

“Obviously.”

“So, the request to exhume is a message, to you. Or—to me.”

Mycroft was silent, probably to avoid repeating himself.

I paused, fighting a desire to say “Get me home.” But this entire charade had been for John’s sake, and his safety was not assured yet. On the contrary.

“That isn’t all. He’s been dedicating songs over the radio to an unnamed person every month. Every fourth Sunday, to be precise. I’m sending you a list. It may simply be a grieving ritual. But given the exhumation request, it may be something more—pointed. You know him better than I.”

True enough. Indeed, I thought I knew John better than I knew Mycroft, the secretive, posturing drama queen.

“Why did you wait this long to tell me?” The subtext was audible: _what are you doing that is of any use to me whatsoever?_

He paused. I knew what that meant: he was embarrassed. “I have only now been ... informed of it.”

“Mycroft—I don’t know what your definition of surveillance is, or how you select the people you hire to do it. But it does your agency no credit whatsoever.”

I spoke coldly and it felt good to excoriate him. He didn’t answer.

“I expect you to continue to look after him. If anything happens to him—”

“It will not be for lack of oversight, little brother.”

I could feel my teeth grinding again in the icy damp as I forced myself not to reply. I had to discover what John was doing with his investigation, and his clear attempt to prod Mycroft into—what? I also had to understand the purpose of the songs he was having played on the air. Did they apply to me, to us? Was it a way of processing grief, or was he broadcasting something specific in the hope or expectation that I would hear them?

The former, I hoped and expected. The latter—didn’t bear thinking about.

* * * * *

The broadcasts had begun a month after my death.

At least, that’s as far back as I could trace them. That was the first week that someone identified only as John dedicated a song to “an absent friend,” via a radio programme called simply “Sunday evening, 6 p.m.”

I didn’t hear them at the time, of course—didn’t know to be listening. But the radio programme keeps its playlists up and recordings streaming for a year.

I’d have known it was John Watson, if I had heard the songs. And by the same token, that the anonymous absent friend was me.

Well, who else? It wasn’t just that John was my only friend; so far as I could tell, I was his, as well.

He must have been counting on Mycroft to alert me, since he knew me better than to think I would listen to such a programme, alive or dead. I went back into the programme’s archives and listened.

July 15th, 2011: “Sweet Old World,” Lucinda Williams.

Style: country-western stretched sideways, somehow.

Voice: strangely multi-coloured and expressive.

Lyrics: mournful, addressed to a friend who committed suicide.

I downloaded and listened, several times in fact. The words were simple, but the images so rich. A pikestaff to the heart.

_“See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world”_

The scattershot beauties of living, flashes of ... love.

_“The pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one:_

_Didn’t you think anyone loved you?”_

Dear God, John. Stop looking inside me. Stop looking. _Stop_.

* * * * *

Four weeks later he had sent out another song to an absent friend.

When it aired in mid-August I was, to the best of my recollection, in the Czech Republic, tailing an eminent Labour MP. Moriarty knew no boundaries in whom he corrupted, or blackmailed, or extorted.

It had been an uncomfortable night, a difficult one. Summer nights should be warm and languid. It may well have been, but I was storing a body in a walk-in freezer and had no occasion to notice.

That second Lucinda Williams song was an inversion of the first. Instead of surveying what the dead man had lost, it recalled everything he’d taken away with him, taken away from the world.

_“I see you now at the piano, your back a slow curve”_

and

_“an empty bottle at your feet”_

My violin, my syringe.

_“Your bad habits and your attitude_

_Your restless ways and your solitude”_

Horrifying. The reverse of a tapestry. I never knew—no, I never thought—what this “suicide” would look like to John. His life had been my only consideration. Not his heart. Not his peace of mind.

I’m sorry. _I’m sorry_. I never meant to take anything away from you. I’ll bring it back. I will. Sooner than you can imagine.

* * * * *

John’s third request, another four weeks on, had been a song from the first world war. It was strangely intimate for the scenario it was supposed to narrate: a soldier missing his dead friend. The melody, too, was a bit saccharine.

_“I miss your voice, the touch of your hand, / Just long to know that you understand, my buddy”_

It wouldn’t be the first queer subtext masked by stoutly heterosexual sentiment. But which of these John intended, if either, I had no idea.

* * * * *

The fourth dedication was from a different war.

_“I’ll be seeing you_

_In all the old familiar places_

_That this heart of mine embraces_

_All day through”_

I bracketed the romantic relationship implied by the lyrics. To the friend lost to suicide John could also say “I’ll be seeing you,” surrounded as he was by all my worldly goods in 221B. By the map of our adventures, in the city beyond our door.

All the old familiar places.

* * * * *

It must have been a coincidence that John’s fifth song wished me sleep, and comfort, in the arms of an angel. (In his second song, the absent friend had been angel, and brother.)

* * * * *

Whenever I could turn my attention to them, I listened to those songs from every point of view; I wrote the lyrics down, trying to see if there was some hidden code, to understand what John meant in dedicating them to me. Most immediately, whether they could alert anyone to my survival.

Eventually I was reassured. John’s first five songs would have confirmed, had anyone been listening, that he thought me well and truly dead.

Plus, of course, they were anonymous dedications on the radio, and John was the commonest name imaginable (for a man so far from common!). His voice was never heard on the air. An “absent friend” was a cliché so well worn that it stood in for any dead or distant person.

No, no one could extrapolate a living Sherlock Holmes from these songs, even if someone ever did associate them with my John. ( _My John._ ) Mycroft had said that John was _unconvinced_ about me being dead; his investigations had created reasonable doubt. Could anyone be watching him, and come to the same conclusion?

The sixth song, from early December, gave me a moment’s pause. No, a moment’s panic.

 _“We’ll meet again / don’t know where /_ _don’t know when_

_but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day”_

But given its wartime setting and its vagueness, it didn’t convey any real conviction that we _would_ meet again—in this lifetime, at least. My calm came creeping back.

Six songs, then, six mournful goodbyes set to music; regrets ( _did_ I detect regret?) and a wish for the rest that eluded me.

* * * * *

Which made it all the more bewildering (agonising) when the next one, on 1 January 2012, was openly a love song. Dangerous, had anyone been listening. Anyone who knew who we were. I had started tracking the programme every week, just in case one came from John for his absent friend. New Year’s Day was a shock.

Joe Cocker, “A to Z.” It was frankly devastating. I’d always wanted John to say things like that to me, mean that about me. Some lines seemed as though he could be speaking them to me, but every last one of them could be me speaking to him.

Cocker is so expressive that I rarely made it through that song without turning it off.

Switching octaves in that scorching, almost raucous voice. Just the pitiably simple refrain, _“I love you A to Z,”_ he managed to make shattering by singing the line twice in a lower octave, the third time with searing intensity an octave higher.

A to Z: was it a reference to the case John had dubbed The Blind Banker? Because he certainly didn’t care for me that way.

* * * * *

I thought I had another four weeks to work out what John meant by dedicating an unequivocal love song to me. But just two weeks later he requested another: Lucinda Williams’ “Something About What Happens When We Talk.”

Same artist and same album as the first two songs after I jumped. But unlike those, nothing about this song of falling in love through conversation corresponded to our circumstances. _“Conversation with you was like a drug.”_

Then two weeks later: The Corrs, “Radio.” Why? Because he was talking to me on—the radio? Again, the literal surface of the lyrics did not fit us. An abandoned lover, unable to move on. Though he might feel I’d abandoned him, _we weren’t lovers like that_.

February 12th: Scandal, “Talk to Me.” A _scandal_ in Belgravia? Was John referring to his blog again? To my long period of mutism after the Adler case? Christ. I had no idea where to even start.

If nothing else, the two-week intervals seemed an invitation to reply to him. To _talk to him_. On the ... _radio_. But if I didn’t know what he was saying to me, how could I reply? And if I didn’t stop obsessing about John and his opaque communiqués, I was going to get myself killed by the _“vultures and thieves at my back”_ before I had a chance to work it out.

* * * * *

As it happened, after mid-February, it was impossible for me to check the playlist of the radio programme until well into March. I was deep undercover in a human trafficking operation being run out of Peshawar. But I kept worrying at the problem, gnawing at it whenever I could afford to be less than hypervigilant. When I re-surfaced in Delhi, my first priority after debriefing was to catch up with John’s songs. The Sunrise Cyber Café on Connaught Place seemed a suitable venue; it was full of backpacker tourists.

February 26th: Saga, “Without You.” Hideous: three musical styles wrapped up in a trench coat. But the singer, and the lyrics. A Freddie Mercury devotee, without a doubt; and the words were, again, something John could almost have said to me, and that I’d have given anything for him to mean.

 _“I built my world around you /_ _You’re always on my mind /_ _I can’t imagine life without you”_

But my task was not to moon over what I wished he was saying, but rather, to work out what he _was_ saying.

It took me a humiliatingly long time to identify John’s code. I spent twelve weeks gnawing at the songs as a complex signifying mechanism, perhaps multilingual, that had to be deciphered.

I went to bed (when I could get to a bed) and woke in the morning (when I could actually sleep) thinking _what is the code?_ All the while pursuing Moriarty’s accomplices, throwing a wrench into the works of his criminal machine, using the law when I could and violence when I had to.

Whenever I could isolate, I spent hours trying to make sense of John’s songs. Those hours turned into days, then weeks. I tried every code and cipher I’d ever encountered. Skip codes, book codes, number codes. Mono- and polyalphabetic ciphers, polygraphic and transposition ciphers. I tried aligning artist names. Song titles. First lines. Refrains. Connections to our cases.

Nothing I came up with made sense. Sometimes a string of letters or words would seem faintly plausible—and then all sense would collapse. One evening I was silently shrieking at the absent John to _leave me the fuck alone_ , when I seemed to hear his voice in my ear, as I’d heard it on the day I jumped. _I know you for real_ , he’d said. _I know you for real_.

Well, so did I know him for real. What was he like? A gratuitously intricate mind with a taste for puzzles? No. That wasn’t John. That was ... almost the opposite of John. So why was I trying to force his messages into an involuted, shrouded, artificial form? John, when he communicates, tries to be straightforward. It’s what I always mocked in his blog entries: the Agatha Christie-like simplicity and vivacity of his language.

Back to the drawing board. Moriarty’s tangled web had contaminated my thinking, made me see mysteries everywhere. Only this can account for how unconscionably long it took me to decipher what John was saying to me. John was limpid in comparison.

What did I have? A day, invariable. A time, invariable. Dates, variable. Songs, variable.

Dates of issue, perhaps. Though that was chancy: could John be certain the radio station would own and play the version he requested?

Literal content, which varied, but most were love songs, and thus not applicable to us. At least his first six songs, in 2011, had reflected my suicide, his sorrow.

March 11th: Jewel, “What’s Simple Is True.” Another love song, damn it. But the title, at least, seemed to confirm that what I was looking for had to be simpler than anything my ingenious hyper-subtlety had turned up.

I had dates, and I had songs with lyrics whose lines could be numbered. The simplest possibility: that the date the song was broadcast might (should?) correspond to the number of the line I was meant to take as John’s message.

Line numbers of lyrics are hardly graven in stone, though. There were sites all over the internet that recorded song lyrics, and no two were wholly consistent in how they divided lyric lines, numbered them. Then John did something unexpected.

On March 25th he requested the same Joe Cocker song as on New Year’s Day. A mistake? No, the anomaly had to be a clue, a key. _Damn_ it.

Was I supposed to use the London A–Z again, as in Sebastian Wilkes’ case? Apply it to the song itself? Was the A–Z online?

With not even a shred of hope, I googled _Joe Cocker A to Z lyrics_ and there it was. _Yes._ _“What’s simple is true.”_ The words to the song “A to Z” were on a site for song lyrics called _www.AZLyrics.com_.

The chill trailed down my spine that I always feel when something is falling into place. This had to be the site whose line numbers John meant for me to use. I went back and extracted the lines from all the songs, using the A–Z site’s numbering. Compiled them. And those lines, from 1 January on, read:

_I like to talk to you_

_Something about what happens when we talk_

_So listen to the radio_

_Talk to me_

_I’m just trying to reach you whatever way I can_

_What’s simple is true_

_No mistake about it_

Relief turned my legs to water. At least, I called it relief. This was a John who had somehow—because he really was pretty damn smart, even if I regularly called him an idiot—worked it out that I was alive and found a way to communicate with me, pretending to be working through grief and loss. A channel as secret as it was public. Hiding in plain sight.

This was a John I could recognize, not someone expressing an unprecedented, indeed a long-denied, romantic feeling for a man who would have done literally anything to provoke it.

Did the correspondence of date and line number work for the 2011 songs? It did not. John’s first six songs were what they seemed to be on their surface: entire songs dedicated to a friend he had lost. It wasn’t until he’d completed his investigation and somehow concluded I was alive, that he began to make his songs into more specific messages. Clever John.

And now I had to think of how and what to answer back, the following Sunday.

* * * * *

Chart music is a foreign language to me—well, worse. I could learn the rudiments of a language in a matter of days. How was I supposed to master the innumerable vapid pop songs John was using as a language?

I’d never deleted from my hard drive the songs I’d found on his MP3 player; I never did delete anything about him, barring his girlfriends. But there were literally too many possibilities, I was drowning in them.

Since the date of my first communication would be April 1st, I had the relative advantage of using a first line. Naturally I couldn’t think of a single one. Or rather, a single suitable one.

I thought of his third Lucinda Williams song, whose first line wasn’t bad: “ _If I had my way, I’d be in your town._ ”

I thought of Queen, “You’re My Best Friend”: _“Ooh, you make me live.”_ I’d tried to die but John wasn’t having it, apparently: he was making me live.

I thought of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Stupid. Besides, I’d thought I’d be home _last_ Christmas.

After more flailing I decided to simply lob back to him his song from December, “We’ll Meet Again.” Reassuring, neutral, decidedly not romantic. On a secure device I opened an account, _anabsentfriend@gmail.com_ , and sent the station a request to play for John the 1941 Ink Spots version, as a variation on his choice of Vera Lynn.

I wondered what he would think when finally, after three months of leaving alternate Sundays open, he got an answer. Would he believe it was me? Or would he think someone was hoaxing him?

The radio announcer had mentioned John’s name and an absent friend, but never mentioned the regularity of his requests. Perhaps it was something many sorrowing people did, and it would have been tactless for them to draw attention to it. So, a trick wouldn’t seem a real danger, unless it was from the radio programme itself.

How would John reply? With some banal and maudlin pop song, I imagined. Pretending that _I_ wasn’t subject to such sentimentality, I went back to playing investigator, judge, jury, and executioner to another dirty little cell of Moriarty’s global crime syndicate, and waited for his response.

April 8th: Kiss, “Is That You?” — _Ha._ That ought to teach me not to pigeonhole John. He'd managed to find a line so dark it made me laugh out loud in a seedy coffee shop, drawing attention to myself when I really should not have done.

_“Is that you lookin’ halfway dead?”_

I felt giddy with delight, with relief. John and I were talking. He’d answered in our familiar teasing code of snark, taking the piss. It took me all of twelve seconds to find my reply, from the American labour anthem “Joe Hill”:

_“Says Joe, ‘but I ain’t dead’”_

I could only imagine the impact that hearing Joan Baez sing those words over and over would have on him. Would he find some way to joke about that? “Well then you did a damned good imitation of it” wasn’t an easy phrase to find in a song.

But instead the tone shifted drastically and the code ... fell apart. The broadcast date of 22 April was higher than the number of lines in the song, and I could have wept. It seemed I was back to square one.

But the song was ... the song was _for me_. “Come On Home to Me,” Tracey Thorn. It was from John, for me. Every one of its twelve lines spoke of our friendship, of his sorrow at my absence. Of waiting for me to return. Every single line. It wasn’t even a love song. How could I have got the code wrong?

 _That_ was it: _that_ was the difference. In all the songs since New Year’s Day most of the lyrics _weren’t_ applicable. Only the line corresponding to the date (and sometimes the one before or after, if they formed a complete sentence) meant anything at all to us, to our lives. Whereas _this_ song: every line fit us.

I was in a small, dingy café across the street from my target’s office in Shanghai when I came up with my hypothesis: when the date is higher than the number of lines in the song, then the message is the whole song? Alternate hypothesis: the message is the title? _Test._

In any case, my reply was easy this time: I’d had the song on my mind for months, and miraculously, the line number worked out.

April 19th: _“I keep workin’ my way back to you, babe”_

If the next line was _“with a burning love inside,”_ well, John was using songs of explicit longing too, and meant nothing by it. The Spinners made it a triumphal anthem in any case.

May 6th: John flipped back to black humour with the unutterably weird

_“I can’t believe you actually died_ _”_

Who knows how long he’d had to search to find that one?

Meanwhile I was getting better at this, and was fairly pleased with myself when I found a classic Chuck Berry line for May 13th:

_“It wasn’t me, Sarge, it wasn’t me”_

The next line even included a pun, and a military title:

_“It must have been some other body, uh uh Sarge, it wasn’t me”_

After I sent the e-mail, I had some panicked remorse: it might seem not funny but heartless. But on May 20th John, who giggled with me at crime scenes, answered merely:

 _“_ I _really hope it’s you”_

To which I shot back, on May 27th,

_“Who did you think I was?”_

* * * * *

The next months were a dichotomy. My life had exactly two dimensions: Moriarty’s criminal network, and John. 

My overriding obsession remained to identify every cluster of Moriarty’s cancerous crime syndicate and to decapitate each one definitively. Either by delegating to the law (a non-starter in lawless countries with corrupt governments), or by depositing the heads in the lap of the British or American secret services, or by taking my own direct action (a euphemism).

It seemed likely that only Moriarty’s own direct reports, and the heads of his far-flung mob branches, knew anything at all about John Watson. I would simply eliminate the heads, expecting that the Greek myth of Hydra would apply: heads might multiply but they’d compete, and they’d know nothing about Moriarty’s sick vendetta against me and mine. 

I was never myself, and I was always alone. Mostly in places where I couldn’t talk to anyone. In disguise, with colored lenses and borrowed behaviours to match hoodies, suits or uniforms.

In this exile, I did some things that made life harder for myself. I’d never tell John. If he asked, I’d lie. I went to London, once. I called his number, more than once, because if I was going to die, I had to hear him say “hello” at least one more time. _“I just had to hear your voice.”_

I indulged in a superstitious refusal to cut my hair, until I was out of the wilderness. Back from exile. Home. It wasn’t rational; it sometimes made disguising myself harder. But it was non-negotiable.

And I was always, always on the run. As the pursuit heated up, the remnants of the network were working overtime, and they knew that someone was making headway against them. Working alone was a necessary evil, and one that had begun to drive me mad. As a momentary escape, communicating with John again was a godsend. It was the counterpoise to my frenetic, frantic life as a nemesis, a golem. And it was the _raison d’être_ of that entire impersonation.

Dreams of John, of London, of 221B, were food and drink to me. Sometimes I woke completely uncertain of where I was, but quite certain of where I’d just been in a dream. I’d crack an eyelid at the faded or peeling wall of a cheap hotel (why do they look the same the world over?), or the rough wooden wall of an outbuilding, and decide to slip back into the dream where I’d just been. Not alone, not in danger, not ... dead.

I’d walk through the spaces of the dream as they gradually dissolved until I was once again where I’d fallen asleep. It was like finding one last half-sip of a perfect single malt in a glass you’d thought was empty. 

I didn’t always dream. Sometimes it was just the dead darkness of a mind exhausted.

In mid-June John began updating his blog again. Talked about his determination to return to work, and to normalcy. His exercise regimen, and a couple of weeks later, his new job, part time in a surgery not too far from Baker Street.

In the following weeks he talked about his colleagues there. Two doctors. Four nurses. A receptionist. I was jealous—no, envious—of anyone who got to see John on a regular basis. Talk to him.

But I could talk to him too, however obliquely. I kept a slip of paper by me, with our song lines forming an exchange like found poetry.

_I’m hungry to hear you_

Please don’t be mad at me

_Don’t make me wait too long_

Tomorrow, just you wait and see

_I’d have waited forever for you to return to my life_

Tell me that you’ll wait for me

_When will I see you?_

I’ll see you when I see you

_What do you want?_

I wanted to go home. I wanted to stop living this blood-soaked life of a comic-book avenger. I _didn’t_ want to hide, run, hunt or kill.

I wanted normality, and cases, and clutter that was mine, and his company and care. I wanted 221B. I wanted my violin.

But most of all I wanted him. _“A harbour in the tempest.”_ If I could have had him with me, I’d have given up all the rest and counted myself lucky.

I read over and over our exchange, trying to grasp the tone of his increasingly—it seemed to me—affectionate words. Granted, they all came from love songs, and there was an inherent distorting effect in that. I didn’t want to overestimate the intensity of his feelings, or the nature of them. It could make things unbearably strained between us if I ever did get home.

The notion that if I chose the wrong song line it would cause him to pull back—it haunted me week after week, until I hesitated to say anything at all beyond the blandest reassurances. And then, reading the exchange yet again, I realized: if I was granting John plausible deniability on the basis of the pre-formed song lines, then I had it as well. 

So on August 5th I went ahead and answered his last question, _“What do you want?,”_ with absolute honesty, in the most naked and truthful words possible:

_“All I want is you.”_

* * * * *

After that I spent a week gritting my teeth and wondering every minute what John would make of that, how he would reply.

Every minute I could spare, that is, from dissolving a protection racket in a sad suburb of Phnom Penh. Dissolving, literally. Murderous little pimp from the American southwest: meet vat of acid.

At last it was Sunday again, after a week that had at least seventeen days. And this time I could listen directly to the broadcast in real time. Didn’t have to wait long, and my legs went to jelly when I heard the song and picked out line 12:

_“_ _I can’t live, I can’t give anymore”_

Was John...suicidal? What had happened? Had someone hurt him? Was it me? What had I done, not done?

I asked him in reply, _“What do you want me to do?”_ and sweated another week, pinging Mycroft regularly for updates on John’s condition. (Still gaunt, haggard. Still visibly depressed. Still haunting the cemetery. Not dating, thank God. —Oh, that’s bad.)

And on August 26th John answered: _“Bring it back, bring it back.”_ In the velvet violin voice of Freddie Mercury, no less, from the poignant, pleading “Love of My Life.” If I hadn’t known better—but I did know better, didn't I?

It was clear that I had to go back to London, had to see John. He kept asking. And for my own peace of mind, because the unanswerables were too many and the stakes too high. This had become a dangerous distraction from The Work, but I now realized that it was also costing John. A flying, undercover visit could be justified, just once. There was always information to relay to or retrieve from London.

I couldn’t go to 221B; there was a non-trivial chance that Mycroft was not the only one surveilling it. Still I daydreamed about it, time and again: slipping into the flat while John was out. Sitting in the dark, in my own chair, waiting for him to come in and find me there. With any luck, say his name out loud before he could shoot me.

What would happen then—was up to him. If he was matey, even if moved, I’d know I’d been projecting my own _sentiment_ onto his borrowed words. But if—if. If it went the other way—how would I be able to leave him again?

* * * * *

It remained only to find a way to set up an encounter. John would understand _“Let’s go back and relive the story about day one.”_ He’d know to come to Barts. (Though what I really wanted to do over was day two.)

His next message showed that he’d understood where, all right, and only needed to know when: _“When will I see you again.”_ Yesterday would have been my preference; I wanted to _share precious moments_ too, by God. But Mycroft sent me a lead so promising on one Sebastian Moran that I had to divert to Tierra del Fuego, answering John, _“It won’t be long.”_

Mycroft’s lead petered out within two weeks—fortunately, because on September 23rd John again raised the emotional temperature by several degrees with a very encouraging _“I wanna be with you.”_

I was torn between something authentic— _“Why aren’t you here with me”_ —and something flippant, cool. _“You can’t always get what you want.”_ The former made little sense, factually, but had the requisite warmth. The latter was more our usual style, taking the piss. Perhaps even flirting a bit. I opted for that, in a moment of cowardice I excused with a promise that as soon as the opportunity offered, I would make it up to him.

The line was, alas, prophetic. In early October I arrived in London and reclaimed one of my bolt-holes (grown excessively dusty in my absence). I tuned the radio to “Sunday Evening 6 p.m.” to hear John’s message. 

It was a warning: _“Somebody’s following, following me.”_

Icy guilt, followed by terror. Out in the field I never panicked, but here: it could be fatal for John if I stayed. He mustn’t be followed to me, or seen to be relieved or happy after seeing me. Twenty-two hours later I was in Belgrade, deluging Mycroft with increasingly furious and menacing messages: he had to find out who was following John and why—whether he was in imminent danger.

If he was, I’d burn London to the ground to protect him. If he wasn’t—I’d spend the time giving chase to Moriarty’s second-in-command, a man as deeply evil and sadistic as his unlamented boss.

For my first ten months away, I had run insane risks. I’d nothing to lose; I’d lost everything I valued. If I did get killed, I wouldn’t be any more dead for John than I already was.

But once I’d admitted to John that I was alive—it was a different story. I had something to live for. A reason to be more careful with my life, for his sake, and for mine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three notes: 1. you don't need to know any of the songs 🎼 John uses to send out his messages; after all, Sherlock mostly doesn't 👀
> 
> 2\. I owe 7PercentSolution a serious debt of gratitude (on the order of an organ or a firstborn child) for volunteering to beta & brit-pick, and for deftly suturing up more than one plot hole wide and deep. 🌞 🐝 ❤️
> 
> 3\. Thank you for the kind welcome you've given this story, and do keep those recommendations for your personal favorite Reichenfixes coming!


	4. I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when Sherlock went silent after my alarm message of 7 October. I had no idea where he was, but obviously he’d had to obscure any connection anyone could make between us. Still, it was almost a physical pain to go from the certainty of an imminent reunion to limbo, from hope to terror.
> 
> Not only was there nothing from Sherlock on 14 October, he also didn’t answer my “Where are you now?” of 21 October. If he didn’t contact me, how could I know he was still alive at all? What if whoever was following me, had found him?

**1\. January–March 2012**

On 6 December 2011 I sent the request to exhume Sherlock’s body, and waited for the official reply. I expected some kind of personal response from his next of kin. His brother, I imagined, since his parents hadn’t even attended his funeral. (What kind of parents do that?)

Ten days later my request was denied. No explanation, just the decision from the authorities, which in itself was not surprising.

More surprising was the absence of any contact from Mycroft. Coward. Take away his army of underlings and the bottomless resources of the British government, and he was just another privileged bloke afraid of emotional topics. Hell, of emotions.

Well. That might not be fair. The one time I’d answered his call, I’d bellowed at him for ten minutes straight. Choking back pain, I had given vent to rage.

December passed in the usual fashion—dark, cold, and damp. The ubiquitous twinkle-lights didn’t stave off the bleakness of the holiday, or of knowing the next three months would be even drearier. But after Christmas I felt myself somehow coming back to life. Daylight had been shrinking for six months; now it was growing. I had hope for the new year, and it came from my growing conviction that Sherlock had to be alive.

I set up my next broadcast for Sherlock on New Year’s Day. This was a new series of songs. Not generic expressions of grief, but signs: I was going to tell him that I knew his death was not as it appeared on the surface.

 _If_ he was alive—always the big if—the challenge would be how to draw his attention to an obscure radio programme. (Certainly he’d ignored it when I listened on the occasional quiet Sunday evening in the flat.) Rattling the bars of Mycroft's cage with the exhumation order was my best chance: he'd look into what else I was up to, and tell Sherlock what I was doing. Sooner rather than later, I had to hope.

And then, if Sherlock was alive to hear the songs—again, the big if—and he was to understand anything beyond a saccharine cloud of “sentiment” (I could hear him saying it derisively), my first selection had to be a transparent clue. It was going to be Joe Cocker, “A to Z.”

He’d pounce on the title, connect it back to the Blind Banker case. He wouldn’t try to use the actual London A–Z, of course. He wouldn’t have much to go on at first, but it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that the date identified a line number.

1 January, line 1: _“I like to talk to you.”_ My first few songs were all about communicating. I’d be leaving every second Sunday open for a reply.

It was one hell of a longshot. But if Sherlock was listening, and could reply, then at some point he’d probably answer—perhaps with some obscure opera number. Or he might go all English music hall. I’d heard him score perfectly on the BBC Radio Four quiz. (“For a case, John.”)

I hoped, and hoped, and listened to the radio to find lines to add to my already long list of phrases I might need. 

_“I turn and think that you are by my side”_

_“I used to live alone before I knew you”_

_“You took your life as lovers often do”_

_“Yeah, stranger things they might have happened”_

If nothing else, my deep dive into music was helping to distract me from the grinding anxiety of waiting: for a sign, a song, a _something_ from Sherlock. _“Hoping someday I’ll breathe again.”_ But the weeks passed with no reply from any absent friend; and then hope began to falter.

I was waiting in suspended animation. What if I’d been wrong? I’d have to reprogram my entire brain, recalibrate my _mourning_ to encompass the months of futile hope that Sherlock wasn’t dead.

Every day that passed involved this internal debate. Was he alive or not? Bills never arrived; everything had been diverted to the bank, paid by direct debits according to the utility companies. I no longer paid rent; Mrs Hudson said that the whole amount was transferred every month from the bank account that still remained open. No one at the bank would tell me what was in there, whether money was still being deposited or not. But I took some comfort from the fact that the bank had not closed the account.

In early March I decided that on the very small chance that Sherlock was alive but just hadn’t understood me, I’d reiterate what he had to do to decode my messages. _“What’s simple is true”_ : in case he actually _was_ trying to use the London A–Z, for example. And the last Sunday of March I sent out the Joe Cocker song again, highlighting the line _“no mistake about it.”_

Time stretched and contracted weirdly, without a schedule. It would skip, and snap. Sleep and meals happened randomly if at all. I’d decide for flimsy reasons to do things and abandon them for even flimsier ones; the whole day would lose its shape, time slopping over the side of the bowl.

So, I took out a calendar and started planning a real schedule, to add to my visits to Ella, to the shops, to Sherlock’s grave. Performing grief was surely still necessary, but it was time to perform it for a larger audience.

I started a half-hearted job search. Even if the bills were being paid, I needed to eat and what little I got from my army pension wasn’t really enough. If I didn’t get out and start working again, exercising, seeing people—there wouldn’t be much left for Sherlock to come home to.

**2\. April–May 2012**

And finally, finally. On 1 April, at 6 p.m., the programme’s first song was dedicated to John by “An Absent Friend.” In fact, it was the one I’d dedicated to him in December: “We’ll Meet Again.” It wasn’t Vera Lynn, this version. The Ink Spots. (Did that mean something?)

Fizzy as champagne I hyperventilated, I punched the air, I whooped and laughed. Mrs Hudson came up to ask if something was wrong. I grabbed her shoulders and kissed her soundly on both cheeks: “No, Mrs H. Nothing’s wrong. Something is _right_.”

But I couldn’t tell her what it was. Instead, I said I’d found an old photo I’d lost of Sherlock and me together, and winced at the soft pity in her stare.

After she was gone, I realized I couldn’t do—anything. Contacting the radio station to ask about that request was a bad idea; I couldn’t risk prompting an indiscreet comment on air. It would even be unwise to ask them _not_ to mention anything about this on the show—it might alert them to something they hadn’t really noticed. Who knows how many people even worked there?

Nothing should change. Nothing must change. I had to keep telegraphing my grief, which had been easier in the dark moments when I thought he still might be dead. (Oh God, was this someone’s prank? It was April Fool’s Day, after all.) I had to walk, look, and sound like a man in mourning. Someone holding onto life by his fingernails.

But to Sherlock: I’d been sending three months of love songs. To verify that it was indeed him—that was going to take a different kind of song. _“Is it really you?”_ is what I wanted to ask. _“Is that you lookin’ halfway dead?”_ is what I sent out, on 8 April. I hoped it would make him laugh.

* * * * *

I still couldn’t be sure that it was him, but my heart nearly stopped when the message he sent back was _“I’m not dead.”_ Assuming it was him, he was confirming what I had hesitantly, hopefully extrapolated from my series of unsatisfactory enquiries.

When I knew him to be alive again, I was reborn, too. I’d tried to brace myself for a disappointment—for bad news, or none. But the voice at the other end of those songs was his. I knew his sarcasm. _“It must’ve been some other_ body _, ’cause it wasn’t me”_ —that was Sherlock all over.

I wasted exactly no time wondering whose body it was I had seen on the pavement, and little time wondering how it had got there. All I cared about was that he was alive again.

We exchanged “is it really you” messages for what seemed like forever. It was unsettling only at first, and then reality clicked back into focus and the mental fog lifted. I didn’t know why Sherlock had done what he’d done, but I trusted him enough to believe it had to have been necessary. The fact that he continued to communicate only by these radio exchanges told me I had to be very careful, for his sake.

But inside—I felt solid, and certain. Serene. Even my dreams reflected it. I stopped seeing the scene outside Barts the way I had been doing. No, I saw Sherlock alive. Sometimes the way I remembered him, sometimes in the weird disguised imagery of dreams. Sometimes he was just a sensation, an impression. But in my dreams he was always alive, which told me something about my subconscious at least, if nothing about his real condition.

**3\. June–July 2012**

By late June I was working again. A neighborhood surgery, the most humdrum kind of medicine, and I wore my cloak of depression like armour. If someone was watching, I didn’t want to abruptly exude vitality and optimism.

Working certainly took care of the amoebic formlessness of time: a regular schedule, and people to be responsible to and for. I had to be focused and prepared. It was good for me, though I’m not sure how good I was for it.

Ella insisted I needed to start writing blog entries again. I tended to resist her suggestions when she made them, but experience had shown that she was right more often than not, so I made a start. Told the “world” (whatever world was still reading my blog) about my new job. About how ordinary it was, though not in so many words, of course. The mad whirl of bad backs, piles, and hernias. I talked vaguely about the other doctors and nurses. Never about patients—just conditions.

A few former readers, still faithful, asked about Sherlock. About whether I’d be writing up any new (they meant old) cases. How could they have forgotten that his reputation was still in ruins? I just answered that it was still too soon. My blog entries were laconic, dreary, rather boring.

I also wore a dreary succession of identical clothes to work. Only the drab colours varied. My expression was sombre, my words to the surgery staff sad or sarcastic; Sherlock’s life depended on it, or might do. I slept less than I needed, to keep up the bags under my reddened eyes.

All this made it a bit surprising when a new nurse named Mary—attractive, blonde, vivacious, clever—started making very clear overtures. Who would want to go out with the morose, sour John Watson I was playing? I didn’t flirt back, not at first.

It wasn’t that I found her unappealing. Once she’d have been exactly the kind of woman to catch my attention. Pretty and fit, with a lovely twinkle in her eye. Although her humour could be acerbic, she also seemed genuinely kind. Treated me almost like she treated the patients—with warmth and understanding. She must’ve had a saviour complex, I thought, or else an ulterior motive, for coming on to me.

But she wasn’t Sherlock. And now that I knew he was alive, he was almost all I thought about, waking or sleeping. Every Sunday I came to life again. At first, I was just so happy to be in touch—no matter how obliquely. But week after week it became more clear to me that what I was feeling was not what I’d felt for Sherlock before—fond, exasperated, admiring, protective. There was definitely _more_.

I didn’t know if there was more for him. I remembered his acute stare, the way he focused on me, how that made me feel. I remembered how he took off his mask of indifference for me, his armour of posh suits, let me see him as he was in mind and body. In a sheet, for God’s sake. In old pyjamas and dressing gowns. His long, slender feet tucked under my leg on the sofa.

It didn’t worry me that he still might not want a relationship. Well, a sexual one. Irene Adler had seen that we had a relationship, even when I denied it. (“We’re not a couple.” “Yes, you are.”) I knew Sherlock cared for me, that I had a unique role in his ambit. Even if I couldn’t break him of the habit of leaving me behind.

If he was still married to his work, fine. He didn’t need to want me that way. He just needed to come back, and I’d find my footing again in the whirlwind of life with Sherlock Holmes. Figure out whether I wanted him that way myself, for that matter.

Ella had told me once, with a cloying rainbows-and-unicorns phrasing, to “ask my dreams for help.” I found it so annoying that I made myself take a second look, see what I was resisting. Lo and behold, she was right: my sleeping brain was just as productive as my waking one, just as insightful, though it spoke a different language.

And my dreams after Sherlock contacted me ... they showed me how I felt differently about him. As intensely as I’d missed him and mourned him, I’d been concealing—even from myself—the _way_ I cared for him.

In dreams he was unguarded, fond. Not astringent or abrasive, as he could so often be. But beautiful. Desirable. And I wanted him, oh how I wanted him.

In one dream I tapped on the door of his bedroom, heard his imperious “Come,” and entered to find him facing mostly away from me, his head bent low. He was clothed only in the cobalt-blue light that saturated the room. I stepped close and ran my hand down his back, from his shoulder-blade to his upper thigh. He shivered and sighed, and I turned him gently round and kissed the corner of his mouth.

Only that, and I came in my dream and in my sheets. ****

* * * * *

The song lines I sent Sherlock were all about my impatience; his replies, reassuring but evasive.

_I’m hungry to hear you._

Please don’t be mad at me.

_Don’t make me wait too long._

Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

_I’d have waited forever for you to return into my life._

Tell me that you’ll wait for me.

_When will I see you?_

I’ll see you when I see you.

_What do you want?_

I wondered whether my increasing emotional intensity was due to the fact that love songs were the default means of communication between us. But it was more likely the reverse: I was choosing love songs to speak to him because that was the way I thought of him. And I wondered whether it was the same with him.

Still, I really wasn’t prepared when on 5 August he answered my query, _“What do you want?”_ with a simple and heart-stopping _“All I want is you.”_

Thank God I’d a week to figure out how what that meant, and how to answer it: “ _I can’t live, if living is without you; I can’t live, I can’t give anymore.”_

**4.** **August–September 2012**

My life revolved around every second Sunday. My weeks were spent either maniacally parsing what he’d said, or poring over song lyrics I could tangle up with his, saying more clearly what I was only now seeing more clearly, feeling more strongly.

He was everything to me. In a way I’d never let any man be everything to me, since I’d lost James.

After that first night at Angelo’s, I’d repeated “I’m not gay” every time the subject came up. Well, there wasn’t a song line I could find that said “I wasn’t lying: I’m not gay, I’m bisexual.” Perhaps it didn’t need saying; he’d probably deduced it long ago. So, I’d _“have to say I love you in a song.”_ See how he answered.

I’d asked him _“What do you want?”_ and he’d answered with U-2: _“All I want is you.”_ When he asked in his turn, _“What do you want me to do?”_ On 26 August I answered that with not one but two songs on the same day, just to make sure he really, really got it:

_“Bring it back, bring it back, don’t take it away from me.”_

and

_“I’ll never get over losing you.”_

The song lines he sent me also seemed to be growing more confessional. I kept a list of them, of course; I had to make sure I was pressing every iota of meaning out of them that they might contain. I read that list over and over, a dozen times a day, two dozen whenever there was a new line to add.

When I thought I’d made myself perfectly clear, and understood him well enough—I began to insist we see each other. I had faith in him, about this bizarre faked death—Irene Adler had had to do the same thing, and I knew it meant something dire. But we had to see each other. I had to understand, and I had to see him. And, if I could, hold him.

I wanted him to tell me where he was, what he was feeling. But not being able to ask those things, I asked over and over when we would meet again. When he’d come home. He kept signalling _soon, it won’t be long, not yet_.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Mary’s attentions at work were becoming almost embarrassing. She angled relentlessly if indirectly for a date, even asked me out herself twice. I didn’t accept, but I didn’t tell her I was married to my work, either. Wouldn’t have been convincing anyway, since anyone could see I wasn’t.

If she’d said, “John, you look like an utter disaster and that’s just the kind of man I like to salvage. Will you let me give you a reason to live again?” I could have answered that while I was flattered by her interest, etc. etc. But as long as she stayed coy, I didn’t see a way to say “Mary, I know a lovely guy at the Met you might like to meet, name’s Greg, or how about Henry, he’s mad as a box of frogs and rich as Croesus,” to make it clear that I wasn’t going to be her next boyfriend.

Around other people she liked to take an excessively proprietary tone with or about me. “Oh, John’s worked three weekends in a row, he deserves to have a Saturday off!” “John doesn’t _take_ sugar in his coffee, remember?” After the first week or two it had gone past flattering and straight into irritating.

It got so obvious that Helena, the office manager, asked me into her glassed-in office, sat me down, and said tactfully, “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if anything or anyone here were making you ... uncomfortable. We do like to keep everyone on board and _above_ board.”

I didn’t pretend not to know what she meant. “Yeah, no, it’s fine. I take it as a compliment, if anything. I’m just not—up for socialising at present. There’s no problem at all, but thanks for checking.”

She huffed a relieved little laugh, and admitted that she’d had to ask this question more often of female staff than of male.

“Yeah, I can imagine. But if I change my mind, I’ll let you know right away. She’s awfully good with patients—her people skills are fine. Really good.”

It was striking that neither Helena nor I said anything about Mary’s competence as a nurse. I’d seen Sherlock give better jabs. Though, well. Perhaps that wasn’t for the best of reasons. Loads of practice, I imagine, back in the day.

* * * * *

With his message of 2 November he promised to meet me, if I understood correctly, at Barts: _“Let’s go back and relive the story about day one,”_ he’d said. —When, exactly? He’d have to find a way to tell me. But I knew I’d be going back to Barts.

Not like the last couple of times I’d been, late in 2011; not as a grieving friend, flatmate, partner. I’d go back to Barts and he’d be there, in the flesh. I’d hear that voice, and see him alive, and hold him. I promised myself that if I saw him standing before me, I’d make sure he knew what he was to me. And I wouldn’t let him go off without me again. Not ever again.

I had another chance, it seemed, to protect him. Which made it particularly worrisome when I started to think someone was following me.

Who knows how long it’d been going on before I noticed. (“You see, but you do not observe.”) On the tube. On the pavement. Inside Tesco. Outside the surgery. Outside Ella’s office, too. There always seemed to be someone loitering, or following, or just barely turning away.

Never the same person twice. Who besides Sherlock had an anonymous army to deploy? Who would bother following me unless it had to do with him? He might actually be behind it, but I had no way to ask. I’d have to get word to him in my next song line. If he was behind it, he wouldn’t be alarmed. And if he wasn’t, he could avoid walking into a trap.

Could someone have caught on to our message exchange via radio? I didn’t really see how, since I hadn’t used my own email address for my radio requests, and I’d kept everything in the songs too vague. I’d refrained from using the tempting _“when we pretend we’re dead,”_ for that reason. Here too, two possibilities: if I warned him via radio, the trackers would either know it or they wouldn’t. If they knew, I’d be revealing nothing by using that channel. If they didn’t, the audience would just hear a spooky song by a classic British folk-rock band.

So, the next Sunday I had the station tell Sherlock _“Somebody’s following, following me.”_

**5.** **October–November 2012**

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when Sherlock went silent after my alarm message of 7 October. I had no idea where he was, but obviously he’d had to obscure any connection anyone could make between us. Still, it was almost a physical pain to go from the certainty of an imminent reunion to limbo, from hope to terror.

Not only was there nothing from Sherlock on 14 October, he also didn’t answer my _“Where are you now?”_ of 21 October. If he didn’t contact me, how could I know he was still alive at all? What if whoever was following me, had found him?

Should I suspend the radio messages? Sometimes I was sure I should; other times I was equally certain I shouldn’t. If anyone had been tracking them, suspending them would be a clear signal that I at least was onto the fact.

There was only one thing to do, though I’d resisted it for months, and I did it now as soon as the 28 October radio programme ended without word from Sherlock. I took the precaution of buying a pay-as-you-go burner phone, just in case whoever was following me was also monitoring my calls.

“Mycroft. It’s John Watson.” My tone was cold.

“Yes. How are you, John?” Of course, he’d already known it was me.

“Where is he?” I _really_ didn’t feel like niceties.

At least he didn’t pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“To be honest, I’m not perfectly certain.”

I scrolled through my mental drop-down menu:

Then what is the point of you?

Oh, you’re being honest now? That’d make a change.

Is “perfectly certain” sophistry?

Fuck you.

All gratifying, none helpful. I breathed in as deeply as I could, in two sharp inhales.

“I’ve not heard from him since 30 September. Before that he hadn’t missed a week since 1 April. What am I to make of it?”

As usual, he too chose his words carefully. “I assume you are aware that he’s acting on the intelligence you gave him. He directed me to increase surveillance on you—”

Oh, Christ, this was too colossal a cock-up. “Increase—you’ve already _been_ surveilling me? Without telling me?”

“John, you—”

My voice was rising. “What if it was _your agents_ I spotted following me? What if Sherlock’s gone off in a frenzy because you couldn’t be arsed to _tell me_ you were having me watched?”

Mycroft didn’t reply immediately. Then he said, gently, “I assigned no one to follow you. Surveillance is on your phone, computer, CCTV, only. This is not your usual number, so you’ve been sensible enough to avoid alerting anyone else who might be monitoring your phone or computer. I’m afraid that whatever you detected is indeed a potentially dangerous development, and Sherlock acted accordingly.”

I was quiet while I calmed down, feeling weak and unsettled again.

“What—what should I do? And before you say it, I can’t just wait. I’ll go mad. I’ll kill someone. Probably you.”

I could hear the reluctant smile in his voice, and felt a flush of irritation at myself for making even that small an overture. But at this point he was my only living link to Sherlock, and I couldn’t afford to weaken that link any further.

“I’m sorry, John, but both of us must wait on Sherlock. Perhaps you would do me the favour of coming in person to see me. Tomorrow evening? And I’m afraid I will have to send a car. It will look like a London taxi, but you’ll recognise the driver.”

Fine. I wasn’t going to object on principle with so much at stake. Whoever was following me was going to have to up their game to keep up with whomever Mycroft would send.

* * * * *

The next day was grim. Patients were needy, I was irritable—both unsympathetic and distracted, not much use to them at all. I’d barely slept all night; no need to fake exhaustion. And Mary the nurse picked that day to try to chivvy me into going for a drink with her after work.

“Really, John, I promise you’ll be better off for a little diversion. You seem stretched so thin. It’ll be good for you.”

“You’re kind to insist, Mary, but I’ve got a—headache.” I’d been about to say “date,” “engagement,” but something about her inquisitive blue stare made me opt for caution. “I never do well mixing noise and alcohol with one of these.”

Her hand still lay on my arm, even as I was patently turning to leave the surgery. Was she seriously still refusing to take no for an answer?

“Promise me then that when you feel better, you’ll let me take you out. I guarantee it’ll do you good.”

Her bright tone didn’t quite conceal the determination edging her voice like the thin steel wire in a florist’s ribbon. And just like that, the penny dropped.

I hadn’t been the object of a pursuit so dogged since I was an adolescent, when kids my age hadn’t mastered the art of giving up in the face of obvious indifference. Mary was an attractive woman, confident and used to getting her way with men. But I hadn’t encouraged her at all, and there was no obvious reason for her to keep at it.

She’d latched on to me immediately, despite my downcast air and the bitter remarks I made to all and sundry. On top of all that, she wasn’t a very practised or capable nurse. Was it my paranoia at work again? She was beginning to look very much like an agent in place. Not one of Mycroft’s people, but someone else, someone who might have had the same doubts I had about Sherlock's death.

I jolted myself out of this speculation, patted her hand, smiled ruefully and escaped out onto the street. Mycroft’s driver would pick me up between work and Baker Street; he’d texted me a location and a taxi number, so I knew which corner I was to hail it from. It was consistent with my claim of a headache—like I just had to get home as soon as I could manage.

The cab picked me up as planned, and I resisted looking back to see whether anyone had been following me, or still was. The driver, who was indeed familiar, pulled away from the curb and drove sedately for the first two or three minutes, then did his best James Bond imitation. We may have driven twenty or twenty-five minutes to end up perhaps eight minutes from the pick-up point. Not at the Diogenes, but at a new apartment block over a purpose-built urban shopping centre near the Russell Square tube station.

* * * * *

The flat was neutral, Ikea-furnished to look less microscopic than it was. Mycroft didn’t look at ease there—probably thought he was slumming. He offered me a drink and I let myself take it, having long got over my numb bout of drinking after Sherlock’s death. The whisky was top-flight.

Mycroft was an expert questioner, and over the course of nearly an hour he got out of me details I hadn’t consciously recalled. Then he paused, thinking, and said, “I suspect you noticed soon after they started tailing you. Either they wanted you to, or they didn’t mind if you did.”

“Ta for that.”

“I meant no insult, John. You’ve done very well. They may be counting on you communicating something to Sherlock—if they’re not certain he’s alive, they may think that alarming you is the best way to settle that open question.”

I sank back in my chair, sighing. I honestly hadn’t thought of that angle. So perhaps sending Sherlock that message was a colossal mistake after all.

Before I could say anything, though, Mycroft said, “I think you were right to warn him. The acceleration of his work seems to be pointing to an imminent dénouement. He was in hiding in London when you alerted him, and he vanished immediately, went underground without a trace.”

He’d been _here_. I thought about that a moment. Picked one of the eight questions I wanted to ask Mycroft: “Just tell me one thing, please. Is he doing this at your behest? Did he fake his death and go underground for you?”

His brows went up, his eyes closed, and he exhaled heavily.

“Not for me, no. For you.”

“ _What?_ For me—how, exactly? What was watching him kill himself supposed to do for _me_?”

Ten minutes later I sat, stunned and speechless, and paralysed with sorrow. Three snipers. Sherlock had literally given up his life for our safety, after I’d called him a machine. I couldn’t take it all in, just then. Had to set it aside for later.

“Where does that leave me, then? What am I to _do_ now? —Don’t say ‘wait.’”

His smile was tight. “I won’t, then, but it’s all either of us can do. I can’t reach him if he won’t turn to me. Keep your radio communication going, and let me know instantly if you hear from him again. You have my secure contact; use only your burner phone, and don’t call from inside Baker Street or the surgery. I promise I’ll do the same.”

Mycroftian promises. I huffed out a laugh, then remembered we weren’t finished.

“There’s more. There’s someone I think you need to investigate.”

I told him about Mary Morstan, about her singularly tenacious pursuit, and the reasons I couldn’t accept her interest at face value.

He looked grave and said, “You do realise that if you’re right, and she’s been put there on purpose, that represents a substantial investment of resources by the organisation Sherlock has been combating all this while. They must be almost certain he’s alive, if they’ve have placed a spy at your elbow. I will indeed look into her, and inform you when I learn anything.”

It was clear I wasn’t going to get anything more that night, and in any case, I might not be able to process anything more that night either. I found the driver waiting in the hall, and he took me back to Baker Street barely two miles away as the crow flies.

* * * * *

After that conversation I thought about little else, ricocheting between stupor, and fury, and aching, raging love. My moods were so volatile I was hard put to it to keep up my hangdog demeanour at work.

I’d already worked it out that Sherlock was alive, but nothing in my most feverish speculations as to his motivations had brought me anywhere close to this: he’d been coerced by threats to his closest friends. He, a man so private he let almost no one in. “I’ve only got one.” “Alone protects me.”

He never seems to have thought that losing him would devastate all of us. _“Didn’t you think anyone loved you?”_

That he’d left me here to grieve instead of telling me: that too was a bitter pill. I’d thought I meant more to him than that. _“You said you loved me but I know you lied.”_

But he hadn’t said that, had he? He’d never made me any promises, at all. On the contrary. He was a master at leaving me behind, he’d done it the very first night at Lauriston Gardens and a hundred times after that.

And now he was out in the world somewhere, alone and in danger and—how had Mycroft put it?— _decapitating_ Moriarty’s vicious crime cartels one by one. Probably without anyone beside him who could shoot his way out of a wet paper bag.

Well. If I hadn’t known he was still alive I’d have wanted to kill him myself when I found out. But I had known, and had resolved to trust him, and I did still trust him. Still, I had to get to him somehow. He needed a partner. He needed me.

I’d spent months resolving what I felt for Sherlock. Wondering what he would think of that, if it would disconcert him. Repel him. But now I knew for certain: he cared as much as I did. And it didn’t matter how he cared—whether he was in love with me, the way I now knew I was with him—I’d love him in any way he let me.

* * * * *

True to his word, on the Thursday Mycroft called my burner phone. Said he couldn’t tell me everything, but that I was right about my steel magnolia admirer, and that I should give her some very minimal encouragement to keep her in place and trying. Before I could object that I could hardly _date_ her, he added that I didn’t have to do anything more than seem a bit warmer and more welcoming at work.

“Will you tell Sherlock about her?”

“As soon as he contacts me, of course. I’ve left a message in two secure locations—virtual locations—but he hasn’t picked them up. He’s gone much longer than this without being in touch; I’m not worried. Yet. And there’s been some activity in Serbia that might have his signature on it.” 

I hoped it would be soon. It should bring him back, knowing that they were on to him, and could easily threaten the three of us in London again. Neither my staying put here nor his staying out in the wilderness guaranteed our safety.

My next message to him was _“When are you comin’ home?”_ on 4 November, and by then my terror at Sherlock’s silence had intensified tenfold. The following Sunday I listened, knowing I wouldn’t hear anything from him. I was wrong, thank God, but his message wasn’t encouraging.

The song was “Don’t you get it?” by Mark Knopfler; the line was _“I gotta be a free man to run.”_ And it was insistent: repeated a good ten times in the song.

On 18 November I answered with a song by Billy Swan, equally insistent: _“Let me help.”_ And damn it, again he didn’t answer the following Sunday, leaving me on the edge of a full-blown meltdown. My nerves were coming through my skin, and Baker Street was a prison; I managed to restrain myself from contacting Mycroft in case someone was watching for me to do so.

My impatience was on full display in my 2 December message: _“What’s taking you so long?”_ in Al Green’s soulful voice. It’d been nearly two months since our meeting was aborted.

And on 9 December, when I was at the end of my rope, just as he’d done in April Sherlock finally answered me: _“Help me if you can, I’m feeling down.”_

He needed help. He needed me. I left 221B for the nearest pub, and in the privacy of the toilet there I phoned Mycroft and told him to get me to Belgrade, Belfast, Belgravia, wherever the actual fuck Sherlock was summoning me from.

As it turned out, I had to get no farther than Baker Street.

“Go home, Doctor Watson,” he said wearily _._ “There’s been a delivery. It’s waiting for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More notes: 1. Do I detect a gathering consensus that I should provide a playlist? 
> 
> 2\. 7PercentSolution has once again worked magic on this chapter. I shudder to think what patient readers would have done without that magic. 
> 
> 3\. Thank you, readers, for coming along and for commenting, whether here or in my inbox on Tumblr. It really does mean the world to me. 🌍 (Speaking of which, if you're on Tumblr under a very different name--do let me know!)


	5. The Empty House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. I passed Mrs Hudson’s darkened flat, slipped into 221B, and sat in my chair to wait in the dark for John.
> 
> I didn’t surprise him, though; he came in silently and carefully. Had I left a trace, or was he always this vigilant? He didn’t go about armed, not usually, but this strange month might be an exception. I said his name—conscious of my own shortened breath and pounding heart, and suddenly self-conscious about my uncharacteristic mane and dubious hygiene.

**December 7–12, 2012**

My long months of being dead drew to a close more abruptly than I’d thought possible. With some delay I found Mycroft’s secure messages informing me that John was not only being followed, but had been surveilled for some time by someone in his own workplace. I left Serbia at speed and spent two days and three sleepless nights getting to London by surface transport, invisible and untraceable.

Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. I passed Mrs Hudson’s darkened flat, slipped into 221B, and sat in my chair to wait in the dark for John.

I didn’t surprise him, though; he came in silently and carefully. Had I left a trace, or was he always this vigilant? He didn’t go about armed, not usually, but this strange month might be an exception. I said his name—conscious of my own shortened breath and pounding heart, and suddenly _self_ -conscious about my uncharacteristic mane and dubious hygiene.

“John. Don’t ... shoot.”

No reply; just an inhale, suddenly loud in the quiet flat. Pale light from the street-lamps leached into the sitting-room, and I knew he could see me better than I could see him. I tried again.

“John. I know I deserve it but please. Really. Don’t shoot me.”

A forced huff of air that could have been a short laugh or a voiceless sob; then, nothing.

Time slowed around me and I sat motionless, sharing space with John for the first time in eighteen months. He was only a dark outline against the lighter rectangle of the door to the corridor. But I knew the _feel_ of his presence, could almost detect his smell. Almost.

Whatever else I’d expected from this meeting—rage, relief, an embrace—it wasn’t a lengthening silence that lapped around us like water.

I finally made to stand, and at the movement John said, “Sherlock.” In his voice I heard all three, the rage, the relief, the embrace. I took an uncertain step toward him and then another. I was afraid he would turn and leave without saying anything more. After all these months of oblique communication. Of questions, assurances. Promises, even.

If it hadn’t been for the tension, taut almost to the snapping point, it would have been anticlimactic. Correction: it decidedly was anticlimactic. My next step was a stumble, and John reached me in time to steady me. I felt his hands on my biceps, then on my shoulders, then on my back as he pulled me stiffly to him.

His arms were hard, and I was strangely boneless. We stood there a few minutes just breathing, re-centring. My head sank to his shoulder and he put his left hand into my hair, which was more lank and oily than I’d realised. Hardly the suave hero’s return, as his next words confirmed.

“You are. Hm. Rather rank. A shower, I think. Wash your hair. I’ll make you some tea.”

He pulled away to tug the curtains shut, then went and turned on the kitchen light, glancing back at me. Must not have liked what he saw, because he came back to pull off my down parka (well, someone’s down parka, I’d stolen it in Belgrade), dropped it on the floor. He turned me toward the bathroom, nudged me down the hall, and thrust a bin bag into my hand.

“Put it all in there.”

I stared as he turned on the taps and got the tub ready for a deep clean; apparently I was too rancid for a mere shower. I’d have been embarrassed, but he didn’t know how long and how rough I’d traveled from central Europe to get to him. He looked up, surprised to see me inert and still fully clothed.

“Come on, now.” As the bathtub filled, he stood and pulled off my hoodie, shirt, undershirt, until I could see my chest flushing dark under my greasy hair.

I came to life and said “I’ll ... be fine.”

I wanted his first time undressing me to go rather differently, if it were ever to happen at all. He understood and stopped. He was still wearing his winter coat, but his face was unacceptably drawn and thin, his eyes indescribably aged. Worse than when I’d met him. Again, the sight stopped me cold. What had I done to him?

“Get in while it’s hot. And God help you if you go anywhere. If you disappear on me, I’ll beat you to a goddamned pulp.”

Though his words were ferocious, his voice was almost flat. And here I’d been about to say the same thing to him: to ask him not to leave, at least; I hadn’t planned any threats.

“I’ll stay if you will,” was all I could manage. He seemed so remote that his leaving felt like a real possibility.

“ _Christ_ , Sherlock.” His entire face compressed—brows, eyes, lips—then relaxed. “Deal.”

He closed the door behind him.

* * * * *

_Not quite the reception I’d been imagining_ , was all I could think. I had thought that he’d react to being taken by surprise in one of two ways: open arms or a fist. This distant, careful reception left me wondering, as I scoured myself clean in the hot bath. It took some work to scrub the engine oil from under my fingernails, wash the grime out of my hair. I rinsed the tub quickly, but in the morning it would need attention.

Afterwards I stared at my reflected image. Our separation, my deception, had left traces. Made changes. We weren’t okay, no matter how much I’d hoped to be welcomed home like the prodigal flatmate, or friend, or better. We weren’t okay. Baseline, though, was that John was alive: I could work with that.

My immediate problem was cosmetic. My stupidly long hair was clean but ungovernable, and it absolutely didn’t fit the image I wanted to present. I’d always expected to return triumphant, all danger eliminated, all foes vanquished. I’d imagined having a thorough debrief and refurbishment first and then striding back into my own life, surprising John and looking the way he’d always known me.

But John had surprised _me_. When he’d communicated that he was being followed, I realised that I was living on borrowed time: whoever was monitoring him at least suspected I wasn’t dead. That sent me hurtling to the Belgrade cell, trying to control that hemorrhage on my own. Then, when I finally saw Mycroft’s report that John’s coworker was a plant from the Moriarty network, I knew for certain that Moriarty’s second in command, Sebastian Moran, as good as knew I was alive.

My solitary mission was useless now, unsustainable, and even more dangerous for John than my open re-appearance. I raced back to London, to Baker Street, without even stopping to see my brother. Panicked that I’d find John already gone—in one way or another.

So, flustered, wrong-footed, wild-haired: there I was. At least I no longer reeked. But still I glowered at myself in the mirror.

“Sherlock?”

John’s voice in the hall.

“Coming.”

I twisted my wet hair into a knot at my nape and went into the kitchen for tea and an air-clearing. Ass-kicking. Whatever.

* * * * *

But John seemed to have gone unexpectedly placid while I’d been sluicing the filth of days off my skin and down the drain. He handed me sweet milky tea with one hand, flapping vaguely at my head with the other.

“Are you gonna ... keep that?”

“The hair? Of course not.” The tea was perfect. Perfect strength, temperature, sweetness. The familiarity of it was quite disproportionately reassuring, and I felt my entire body begin to relax.

I headed to the sofa and sank in, wrapping myself in the coverlet that seemed never to have been moved from where I’d left it. John followed and sat at the other end, turned so that he could see me.

“Before we start, I’d like to ask you something.”

His brows lifted to invite my question.

“Exactly how angry are you? It’s just that I’m a bit wary at the moment. Well, this year.”

His mouth quirked a bit and he almost smiled. “Not angry, not now. Not for months. Once I knew for sure you were alive, I figured you had a hell of a good reason for putting me through this. And then at the end of October, Mycroft told me what the reason was. So I really couldn’t be angry about _that_.”

I heard the subtext. “But you could be angry about something else.”

“Well, yes. Obviously. I can see why you had to mislead almost everyone else, but not me. You not only made me watch, but you left me there in the dark. _One word_ , Sherlock. That is _all_ I would have needed. One word to let me know you were alive."

His breathing had accelerated a bit. He was trying to keep his temper, though.

“I’ve nearly been in contact so many times, but ... I worried that, you know, you might say something indiscreet.” Even as I said it, I winced: it did sound repulsively condescending, though it was true. John had always been astonished at my ability to lie for a case; he’d never mastered the art.

“ _What?_ ” Astonished didn’t cover it, he was outraged.

“Well, you know, let the cat out of the bag.”

But John can always surprise me. I’d expected a shouted tirade at the very least, or a dive across the sofa; instead he giggled weakly, then started to cackle, and finally to guffaw until he was gasping. Whenever he started to regain some control, one look at my stunned face would set him off again. Finally, when he’d caught his breath again, he explained.

“You thought I would give you away. You massive _dick_. I nearly killed myself staying in character as the grieving friend for eighteen months—well, a year. However long I’ve known you were alive out there, and unable to tell me about it.”

He was wiping his eyes and so was I, but not for the same reason. He’d said “nearly killed myself,” and that was too much, it was insupportable. I couldn’t take this just now, not while I could finally see him again after leaving to _keep_ him from dying.

“Staying in character.”

“ _Yes,_ you git! I’ve been playing the devastated friend for so long my back’s gone permanently curved and I barely remember how to smile. I couldn’t let anyone see I was investigating your suicide, could I? I had to keep a low profile, emphasis on the low.”

I should probably have acknowledged right then and there how wrong I was to think he’d slip up, let anyone know I was alive. (Though there _was_ the question of how Moran had known to plant a spy in his surgery in the first place.) But I was preoccupied by the reminder that John had _investigated my suicide_.

I reached across and gripped his forearm. “Tell me about that. Tell me about your investigation.”

The last of his hilarity vanished, and he began at the beginning. Two anomalies, he said. One physical, one psychological. Irreconcilable with the explanation of suicide.

By the end of it I was staring at him with unconcealed admiration, and no little wonderment. He looked at me suspiciously.

“You’re not ... interrupting me. Finishing my sentences. Saying ‘I know’ or ‘obvious.’ Who are you and what have you done with Sherlock Holmes?”

I’d missed hearing him talk for so long, and I’d sworn that if I ever got the chance again, I’d listen better. Besides, it was frankly fascinating. A different side to John. I couldn’t say any of that, of course.

“I’m impressed, that’s all. You worked all of that out without any help—”

“ _Oi_ , just because you’re a genius doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

I hurried to clarify. “No, no, I mean, you’d no one to share the leg work, talk things through with you. You had to do it all on your own. I’ve learned how hard that is.” _Solo work after having_ you _with me_.

Both the suspicion and the offence left his expression; he sighed and answered, “If I’d told anyone they’d have thought I was mad. Sometimes _I_ thought I was.”

After a moment he went on, “It wasn’t that hard, you know. Once I got over the worst of the mind fog. Grief really doesn’t help cognition.”

I hummed an acknowledgment. “Neither does homesickness.”

“Neither does lovesickness.”

The breath rushed out of my lungs and I waited a moment to see if he would look at me. He didn’t.

“No,” I agreed.

The air was electric. I’d never thought to hear words like this from John. It meant so much more than the borrowed words in songs I’d had to speculate about. I found my thoughts going blurred and loose around the edges. My body felt increasingly heavy and I was sorely tempted to close my eyes, just sink back and—

“John!” I said, slurring his name. “What did you put in this tea?”

This time he looked up and his smile, his fondest one, reached all the way up to his eyes. He had the nerve to laugh, or at least I think he did, as he said, “Payback?”

I tried to rouse myself but it was a lost cause, I was already too far gone. The last thing I felt was John stretching me out on the familiar sofa and bringing the coverlet up over my shoulders.

* * * * *

I came to consciousness with a thrashing jolt and stared about me, disoriented. Then levitated out of my nest and staggered to the bathroom, desperate to relieve my aching bladder. It must have been a _very_ long night’s sleep—I was wide awake when I finally stalked into the kitchen to glare at John.

He was wearing different clothes, and it was nearly dark, in these shortest days of the year.

“I slept nearly round the clock.” I sounded accusatory.

“Yep.”

“You drugged me.” I was still indignant: what ridiculous timing for what he had cheerfully called “payback.”

“Did you see yourself? You needed that sleep more than you needed any more explanations or heart-to-hearts.” His voice was matter-of-fact as he poured hot water into the teapot. “Besides, it was fun.”

When had John become this diabolical? Was it possible I’d never known him at all? I felt a grin stretching my cheeks, and he added,

“It wasn’t only the science of deduction I’ve been picking up from you, you know.”

“Wasn’t it a bit risky, putting me out for twenty hours?”

“I didn’t. You were sleeping naturally from 8 o’clock this morning on.” His tone was equable, even a bit tolerant, as though _I_ were being difficult and he the soul of sweet reason.

I swept the coverlet around me, reaching for some dignity.

“So you weren’t expected at the surgery today.” He didn’t look like he’d spent a restful day at the flat, but it was obvious he hadn’t gone out, either.

“Off today and tomorrow,” he answered. He’d made some toast the way I like it—the butter allowed to melt before the honey is slathered on—and handed it to me on a plate. “Wouldn’t do to change my schedule.”

“I didn’t even have time to text Mycroft,” I said through a mouthful of perfect toast. The honey tasted of England. It was so familiar, yet so long ago. I felt my chest ache.

“Yeah, did that while you were in the bath. He already knew you were here, anyway.”

“Thousand-eyed Argos,” I muttered.

He went on, “You’ll spend two more days here, under the radar. Then we’ll spring the trap.”

A rush of anger. What had they decided without me? What could they even _know_ about what I’d been doing?

“What trap would that be?” My voice sounded sour even to me.

“Dunno. You’ll have to tell us. He’ll be here in an hour or so.”

I chewed and swallowed, mollified. “So why two more days?”

“Your doctor’s orders. You need rest; I need to ... settle in to having you home.”

Home.

“Settle in?”

“Yeah, I checked on you every fifteen minutes most of the night.” And indeed, even smiling he did look more drawn than last night.

“Sorry, John. Sorry.” The tea was perfect, too—assuming there wasn’t anything added to it this time. Standing in the kitchen with tea and toast: another recurring daydream coming true.

“Couldn’t trust you not to bolt again. You know. _‘Gotta be a free man to run.’_ ”

Thank God he'd mentioned the songs at last. My hand shot out and I gripped his wrist hard. I seemed to keep trying to capture him.

“Did you mean it—everything you said to me in those songs?” My mouth was dry.

He looked at me evenly. “Did you?”

“Every word.”

“Good. So did I.” If my voice had been passionately emphatic, John’s was level.

We stared, wordlessly saying what would eventually need to be said out loud.

“We’ll talk properly, when your _pursuers_ are sorted. For now, take this as an IOU.”

He leaned forward and gave me the gentlest kiss, first at the corner of my mouth, and then as I turned to him, full on the lips. Every nerve ending in my body, every neuron in my brain, lit up, and I was weightless and dizzy.

Hang on. “Did you drug my toast?”

He laughed, sounding younger than I’d yet heard him. Pulled back, and said, “Tonight you’re sleeping in a bed.”

I had to agree. My reunion with our sofa had been welcome, but its shape not entirely welcoming, at least not for twenty hours straight.

“You?” I was a little breathless, but I had to know.

“Not the same bed.” I must have let some disappointment show, because he added, “Not yet. Let’s get through this first, yeah?”

It was only logical. We’d been so careful for so long; we’d sacrificed so much; the danger was no less because we were together again, in fact it was greater. It made no sense to let our guard down now, lose focus. But still it rankled to have to wait.

Just another thing to hold against Moriarty the madman, then.

* * * * *

Mycroft was a bit later than expected, and that was fine, John and I just sat on the sofa while I caught him up on what I’d been doing while I was in Serbia sporadically over the last two months. The loose affiliation of criminals operating in Belgrade was ruthless but not always effective; they seemed more in competition than in collusion. That gave me a chance to turn one of them.

“I’d been identifying a weak link to approach—a man with a pressure point I could exploit. Thought I’d found the perfect one: Luka Miletić, who’d been a sniper in the Serbian irregulars operating in Kosovo. I wanted to have it all in place before I brought in back-up.”

“Brought me in, you mean. You haven’t been in Belgrade the whole two months, have you?”

“No, I was in and out, running various operations at once. But I went back to Belgrade when things started shaping up with Miletić.” There wasn't time now to give him the whole backstory.

“The goal was for him to meet with Moran, the pretext being to sort out a stable hierarchy in the gang. If Miletić helped, I told him he’d get to head the Balkan operation. He was ready to go in armed and do the dirty work, if he had trouble restraining Moran. I thought that sending in a crack shot was not only poetic justice, but also more likely to result in the right man dying, if there was any shooting. After all, Moran would almost certainly recognise _me_ , so I couldn't risk being seen until he was handcuffed and legshackled.

“My plan was fairly chancy, but if Miletić did secure a meeting and it went well, then I was going to need some help getting out of there alive with Moran. So I scheduled yesterday’s ‘Help’ message. After all, if the network was having you followed, they must have suspected I was alive. That put you at risk, too, and the whole point of keeping us apart disappeared.”

“I’m glad you meant to call me in. The thought of you escorting a prisoner like that alone makes my blood run cold, and not for the right reasons. Your gun safety protocols are appalling.”

“I’ve had occasion to get better.” I sounded a little defensive. It was true that John was immeasurably better with a gun than I was, but my work while ‘dead’ had meant that I’d got quite comfortable, and capable enough, using one.

“Yeah, well, there was a lot of room for improvement.”

Before I could object to his teasing about my gunmanship, he forestalled me.

“But if you were waiting for me, why’ve you come back?”

I frowned. “Because I found Mycroft’s message. Late, though, just Friday morning. That was the first I knew that not only were people following you, but one had been planted in your very surgery, and was trying to get even closer. That had to be Moran’s doing. I dropped Miletić and came back here, got to London not long before the radio aired my song request.”

“So, Moran’s out there, and he’s gunning for you.” John’s voice was thoughtful; then he snorted. “And Miletić? Seriously? Are _all_ your enemies M’s?”

“My collection of M’s is a fine one,” I said loftily. “Moriarty alone is enough to make any letter illustrious, and there was Morgan the poisoner, and Merridew the serial killer, of abominable memory, and Morstan, who’s been pursuing you, and finally, our friend Moran, who is probably after both of us now.”

I opened a mental file and read aloud from Moran’s bloodstained _curriculum vitae_ while John grew sombre.

Mycroft walked in on my recitation and I didn’t even hear him until his urbane, mordant voice broke in on it.

“Welcome back, brother mine. Interesting choice of coiffure. Are you really going to keep it?”

“You’re just envious,” I retorted smugly. He looked chagrined, because I was right.

* * * * *

When John writes about my return for his blog—the part of it that can be revealed, not the “I executed another man for Sherlock” part—he’ll make a thrilling drama out of the three-sided argument with Mycroft. The only reason there wasn’t actual shouting is that we couldn’t afford to draw any more attention to the flat than Mycroft already had, coming in.

But it wasn’t especially exciting, our hissed confabulation. Mycroft wanted John and me to serve as bait for Moran, living “normally” while waiting for the guillotine to fall, but that struck me as too dangerous. So long as he was free in London, our life would really not have been worth living. Night and day the shadow would have been over us, and sooner or later his chance must have come.

I wanted to simply summon Moran to a meeting and detain him, as I’d meant to do in Belgrade. Well, have Mycroft’s people detain him. Mycroft demurred, which I thought rather hypocritical, since he’s never hesitated to snatch people off the street for his own convenience. But he argued that Moran could be relied upon to imitate Moriarty and set up his own snipers to outflank us. He was right, of course. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

But it was John who had the really shrewd idea. On the off-chance that his nurse Mary was more than a menial in the Moriarty hierarchy, he said, why not try to use her to lure Moran, and arrest them both at the same time? If he issued an impromptu invitation, Moran would be caught off-guard and with no time to set up a counter-force.

I’m sure I looked proud, and Mycroft had that sucking-on-a-lemon look that meant he was reluctantly impressed.

“She _was_ one of the three snipers Moriarty was threatening Sherlock with in 2011. It’s even likely she was with you at the pool in 2010. So it’s entirely possible that she’s a valuable asset.”

John’s proposal had the advantages of elegance and economy, speed and surety. It meant that I would have to remain in hiding until he returned to the surgery and made a date with Morstan at Baker Street. Once there we would immobilise her and force her to summon Moran.

That was the dicey moment: if she wasn’t important enough, he’d abandon her to us. If she was, though—we had a chance of getting him unprotected, or at least off-balance. Even if she was expendable, he might try to use Morstan to get John alone, take him hostage, and use him to get at me. The idea of turning the tables on Moran with the same stratagem had considerable appeal.

* * * * *

The next forty-eight hours were unutterably precious. Although Mrs Hudson was away—thankfully, since her presence would have been an immense complication—I had to be non-existent in the flat. No violin, no audible conversation, no crack in the window-curtains. John went out for his morning run as usual, and stopped by the shops on the way back, but brought back nothing more or different than he ever did, living on his own.

 _“When we pretend we’re dead”_ : the song lyric had never seemed so appropriate.

He and I spent the Tuesday just learning to be together again.

Well, it was always easy to _be_ with John; _“it feels like home.”_ But it was unrealistic to imagine that we would be blissfully reunited, or constantly exchanging meaningful glances, or even familiarly at ease in each other’s orbit. There was too much at stake to lose focus.

We relearned the sound of each other’s voices, and the rhythms of conversation. The unspoken in each other’s words. We talked quietly, mostly superficially, but these were practice conversations, placeholders for when we could put this entire episode behind us.

I managed to make him laugh a few times, mostly on purpose, though not always. We had tea. Just once he ran his hand through my hair in passing, and I rather successfully diverted an incipient groan into a reflective “hmm.”

Wednesday, the third morning after my return, he came into the kitchen dressed for work and looking grim. I handed him his coffee and he took it without comment.

“Something—wrong?” The day before had been good, but now he seemed both morose and distant.

“Nah, I’m just getting ready to face Nurse Mary and pretend to ask her out, that’s all. When what I’d like to do is ... Psssss. Never mind; I’ll be able to put on the act when I’m face-to-face with her.”

Mary was one woman towards whom I didn’t need to feel even an iota of jealousy. That was refreshing. In her photo she was gamine and platinum, quite appealing in a self-fashioning way. John had described her blatant attempts to charm him, to get close to him, alternating between insistence and sympathy. She wasn’t his type, obviously. Besides, for all he’d sometimes wanted to kill me himself before I went away, he tended to deprecate anyone else trying to do so.

* * * * *

We were planning on Morstan being ready to come as soon as John invited her, that very evening. I had nothing to do but wait until she would come to the flat to meet John—and find me, instead.

In the meantime, I was on the alert. No texting John, no going out, no violin or even John’s MP-3 player. _Tedious_. But I holed up in my bedroom with books I had missed, and listened for anything unusual.

The only light relief came in the late afternoon when Mycroft and four of his minions came in the back way, through Mrs Hudson’s flat and up two floors to crowd into John's bedroom. The sight of them (especially Mycroft) scuttling upstairs as fast as they could made me smile. But the time dragged.

When things finally started to happen, it all went quite absurdly smoothly. If I’d read it in one of John’s blog entries, I’d have called it completely unbelievable. At the end of the workday he told Morstan he’d like to take her up on her invitation to get together, if she was still willing. She seemed pleased, and proposed an evening out on the Friday; he suggested that very evening, a mid-week drink in his own flat, quieter and more comfortable than a pub.

She said that he was looking happier; clever John answered gallantly that now he had a nice date to look forward to. He told her how to get to the flat. Timing being important, he asked her to come by at half-seven, give him time to shower and put out some nibbles. (Revolting expression.)

I didn’t even see him until it was all over; by 6 p.m. he was at his post in the empty house directly across from our sitting-room windows. It provided him with a clear view of what was going on not only in the room, but also on the street and the rooftops around. I knew that the distance was well within his range should anything go awry with Morstan or Moran, unless his aim had deteriorated since Jeff Hope.

When Mary Morstan arrived shortly after 7:30 I rang her in, let her find her way up. She came upstairs with a bottle of red and a cheerful smile that vanished as she entered the living room and saw no sign of John. I must have been an ugly surprise, stepping out from the kitchen with my gun drawn, in my habitual suit. Only my hair was unfamiliar, like something out of _The Last of the Mohicans_.

I made her sit in a straight-backed chair which I’d positioned in front of the fireplace, directly aligned with the window. The chair was facing the fire, but I made her sit on it wrong way round, facing into the room. I tossed her a pair of handcuffs and told her to put her hands through the slats at the back of the chair and cuff them, or I would shoot her.

“No, you won’t,” she snapped.

I twitched the curtain open from the side, keeping out of view.

I wondered where she had formed such a poor opinion of me. “Moran hasn’t told you, then?”

“Told me what?” Her expression stayed calm but her voice had gone up in pitch: she was nervous. Perhaps Moran made a habit of not telling her things.

“While you’ve been trying to seduce John Watson, I’ve been busy. Ask your boss to tell you how many of the network are dead now, thanks to me.” I raised my gun, the Glock given me by Mycroft, and took aim at the middle of her forehead.

It was enough to make her re-think her insolence. Perhaps she was relying on help being close by. Ah, that was it: the man must be near enough to make her think that if she just waited, she would be rescued. _Gotcha!  
_

Once she’d complied, I sat down in another desk chair opposite, carefully placed so the wall between the windows shielded me from being seen from outside. Her face went sour as I proceeded to deduce her mercilessly, though in truth I couldn’t be entirely sure which of the qualities I was extrapolating were hers, and which belonged to her persona as Mary the nurse.

If I hadn’t known Mycroft and his team were upstairs, her vindictive expression might have given me pause. The twinkling charm John had mentioned had vanished, and she was all stone-cold antipathy. But I left my own mask in place, asking coolly, “Did I miss anything?”

“Just one thing. Moran’s not my boss. He’s my partner; we run the business together. He couldn’t do it alone.”

“Nor could you, perhaps.” She was already disconcerted and furiously angry; I wanted to goad her into an indiscretion.

“Oh, I could. We work together, but he’s the brawn, not the brains. You men: always assuming the boss is a man.”

“So, Ms Morstan. You wanted me, here I am. What _do_ you want?”

She looked at me venomously. “You know what I want: stop interfering, stop _inconveniencing_ us. If you do, we’ll leave you and your boy wonder alone. If you don’t—you’ll both be dead.”

This pretense at negotiating was a blatant play for time. No matter what promise I might make, neither she nor Moran would let either of us live.

I jeered and patronised her, told her it might well be she who ended up dead; I kept trying to make her lose her temper, but she’d regained her calm. That composure confirmed that Moran must indeed be somewhere in the vicinity.

So I played along. “Have him come here, then. We have to discuss terms.”

“You can negotiate with me.”

“You said you were equal partners. You both have to be here. Give me a number and I’ll text him.”

She looked annoyed, but managed to say “Zero seven three zero three four…” before we both recoiled at two shots, fired across the street.

While I registered the fact that the glass in the window was intact, a thunder of footsteps stampeded down from John’s bedroom upstairs. Two agents burst into the room and trained their weapons on Morstan while the other two pounded down the stairs and out the front door.

I closed the curtains again just in case, wondering when Mycroft's agents had worked out where in the room they were out of any light of sight from outside. Perhaps it was second nature, for professionals.

Mycroft himself strolled in, looking complacent. “A happy meeting, Ms Morstan. These agents will be taking you into custody now. I look forward to a long chat with you in the morning.”

Morstan’s language took a deplorably vulgar turn as the agents uncuffed her from the chair and frog-marched her down the stairs, but I was too anxious to appreciate it. I wheeled around and barked at my brother, “What happened? Who’s been shot? Is John alright?”

“I’m checking.” Seeing him absorbed in his phone I ran back to the street window only to see John walking away down the street, as relaxed as though he’d never been covering a murderer in our flat from the house opposite. I sagged against the window with relief.

Mycroft announced that on the second floor of the building opposite his agents had found a body with two bullet wounds, one in the back of his neck, the other in his right temple. He turned his phone screen in my direction. I leaned in to see, and breathed again.

“Sebastian Moran—what are the fucking _odds_? Did you know this would happen?”

Mycroft managed to look both dismissive and guilty as he said, “Of course not, we’re none of us clairvoyant. We had agreed John would be stationed in what seemed to us to be a judicious post for observation, never dreaming that Moran would choose the same spot for his attack.”

Five minutes later Mycroft received another text: Moran had been shot while setting up a high-calibre rifle with a heat sensor. They’d found a handgun, too, presumably the murder weapon. I knew better than to fear it would have John’s fingerprints on it.

“No sign of his killer,” Mycroft said with a pious air. “Such a shame.”

* * * * *

The aftermath was brief, the debriefing cursory; we’d have to wait until Morstan was interviewed the next morning to know the details for certain. John texted Mycroft that he’d be back in the flat in an hour and Mycroft, showing welcome tact, didn’t stay.

It seemed much longer than an hour before John came back, carrying, of all things, an armful of groceries. He was as unruffled as the night he shot Jeff Hope; I was not. In all these months I had been doing the impossible and the insane to protect John, forgetting that he was infinitely happier—safer—saner—protecting, than being protected. This lesson I swore not to forget.

He caught me staring and gave me that little glance and quizzical head-shake that meant “What?” For so long I’d been afraid I’d never see it again.

I couldn’t answer, but he seemed to understand anyway. He stepped away from the shopping, leaned back against the counter, and said, “Get over here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More notes: 1. Like most fics, this one doesn’t mark where I’m quoting the show directly; where you detect a weird register shift to Conan Doyle-esque formality—I imported a few sentences from “The Empty House,” nearly verbatim but _mutatis mutandis_ and other handy Latin words. 
> 
> 2\. Are you thinking of your favorite Reichenfixits to recommend? I hope so. Put them in the comments box on any chapter! A URL is a kindness. (Ahem: I added a sixth chapter for some stress release, so this fic will conclude on August 23rd: Sunday evening at 6 p.m. Sorry to fall short of truth in advertising! ) 
> 
> 3\. Once again, 7PercentSolution has rescued this chapter from 3 cases of inverted sequence, 1 of impossible causation, 2 of mislaid characters, and 4 of completely uncharacteristic behavior. Without her the chapter would have been one long string of accidental comedy. She's sparing my unwitting brother a very long list of reproaches and complaints, I tell you.


	6. Killing me softly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The morning passed with us only vaguely aware, and very little concerned, that somewhere else an interrogation was in progress. There was such intensity to the thrill of discovering Sherlock in this dimension that I wished the outside world well away.
> 
> Before I at least was ready, the outside world was calling to threaten us with a post-interview debriefing. Morstan had, apparently, disclosed quite a few features of interest.

**9 December 2012—6 January 2013**

He came home. For the longest time that was all I could think: he’s come back, he’s home. I couldn’t find any words to speak, just silence and breathing, as I heard that voice I’d thought I’d never hear again, asking me not to shoot him.

Even after I knew Sherlock hadn’t died that day at Barts, there was always a chance he’d never make it back to London alive. To me. So when he did turn up—my package, delivered to Baker Street—I was totally overwhelmed and unable to do anything but hold him. Locked in my arms, stiff and strange and uncomfortable.

And, I gradually registered, indescribably in need of a shower.

This wasn’t the reunion of a love story or a spy thriller with a romantic side-plot, all gold lighting and soft focus and violins swelling in the film score. It was the return of a man who had never hesitated to do a full-body dive into a skip in search of evidence, and thought nothing of contaminating a refrigerator with severed body parts.

This entirely mundane detail—Sherlock urgently needed to wash—wore off both my dazed paralysis, and the discomfort of working out how to be with him on these new terms. Whatever they were. I whisked the curtains closed, turned on the lights, and saw that he was gaunt and tired and sporting long hair. I bundled him down the hall and into the bath, focusing only on the now. Looking forward, obviously, to the after—but with as much trepidation as eagerness.

But there was a great deal to do first.

* * * * *

I didn’t really hesitate when I saw him in danger. I never had. He was mine to protect, and I never saw the point of cutting things too fine.

I had taken up my position in the empty house opposite the flat, almost two hours before nurse Mary was due to arrive for our date. It was quite cold, the only light was filtering in from the street, through the single wide window. I settled in by the window, keeping an eye on the street and pavement and roofs opposite. 

I couldn’t afford to get stiff or clumsy or distracted, so I changed positions often: I sat, stood, crouched, even stretched out on the floor for a few minutes.

Just after 7:30 Mary Morstan arrived at the front door of 221b, and I blessed the day we’d had that lock release installed to spare Mrs Hudson’s hip. In no time Sherlock had her seated in full view of the window, cuffed through the metal bars of the chair back like the criminal she was. Sherlock kept to the narrow space invisible from the window, so I never saw him at all. A longish period of conversation ensued; he was stalling, I knew, and Mary probably was too.

There was a sudden noise downstairs: the flat’s back door clicked. I checked my phone; no text from Mycroft that one of his agents was on the move. My heart rate sped up. Well, of all the unwelcome coincidences: someone else had had the same idea, that this unoccupied space provided a fine view of Baker Street.

Silently I scuttled backwards into the alcove set into the far corner, where I could be invisible from nearly anywhere in the room. It was the darkest place and the farthest from the window that a rival intruder was undoubtedly going to make for. I could only hope that he’d be so focused on the drama happening across the street that he wouldn't check the room. Just in case, I drew the Glock that Mycroft had provided and clicked the safety off.

Someone was coming quietly up the stairs; I didn’t know for sure it was Moran, though it seemed likely. He wasn't using a torch. When he came into the front room he was wearing a black balaclava; that fact alone, plus the sniper’s rifle he was taking out of a bag and expertly assembling in the dark, gave me all the identifying information I needed. If it wasn’t Moran it was someone in his employ.

He opened the sash window, propped it carefully, knelt, lifted the rifle and started to take careful aim. Why was he aiming at Mary? Was he assuming that if she was shot, Sherlock would move into view? It didn’t matter; at that point I decided to shoot first, ask questions later. Well, I wouldn’t be asking _him_ : I fired, two quick shots to be sure, into nape and temple. He shouldn’t have taken aim.

I didn’t waste a second examining the body; Sherlock could scold me later. I just left the handgun, wiped carefully to remove any prints, and exited the way we’d both come in, from the back. Any minute now Mycroft and Sherlock and a few agents or some combination of these would be swarming in, and my presence there would be a complication for Mycroft.

I kept an eye out in case Moran had left anyone keeping watch, but saw no one. I didn’t take the quickest way back out to Baker Street. If any neighbours had heard the shots they were keeping their heads down, but very possibly calling the police; so I headed down the street, showing no hurry at all. I’d give things some time to calm down—there were supplies to get at the Tesco twenty minutes away. Having no way to text Sherlock, I texted that to Mycroft.

An hour later I was heading up the steps to the flat, whistling a maudlin old song my mother used to sing: “Return to me: oh my dear, I’m so lonely.”

And he had. He had. He was there, waiting. He followed me into the kitchen and watched while I put the shopping down with studied calm; concealing my nerves, I started to put things away. But when I caught a glimpse of him, troubled and tense, my heart twisted and I said, “Get over here.”

* * * * *

I went from apprehension to ecstasy in the course of ten seconds, and it’s safe to say I never went back. He crossed the kitchen looking desperately unsure of himself, and that was all it took to get me out of my own head, shift my focus to him, to holding and touching him, running my hands along his too-prominent ribs, pulling him close, reaching up to kiss him. I gave it everything I had, to tell him he was wanted beyond doubt or caution.

And pulled back. The euphoria of coming home to find him here and safe, of neatly excising a major threat to him, shouldn’t cloud my thinking.

“Wait.”

He was breathing hard, looked confused. “What?”

“It’s—safe now? For tonight, at least?”

For a moment he looked speculative. “It should be. The two of them are taken care of, and I know of no other immediate dangers.”

I nodded, then kissed him again.

And God, he was so responsive. His plush, curious mouth, tongue moving tenderly, tight little vocalisations as he burrowed blindly closer. The counter dug into my lower back and I shifted up to sit on it, pulling him between my legs at an angle that had him groaning rather loudly for one person, until I realised it was both of us responding to that perfect angle of contact. Half hard to rock hard and searching, questing.

It was seriously good to feel him grinding in to me, moaning my name as though it were the only word he knew. To wrap my arms around his head and neck, wind my fingers through his thick curly hair, so oddly long. To breathe him in, the subtle clean scent of him and his poncey shampoo I’d never used or binned. His breath, not just delicious but arousing to a hyperbolic degree. After all these months, years really, there was nothing on my mind or skin but the overwhelming sensations of the man I’d wanted from the first day I saw him.

Our trip down the hall to his bedroom went miles better than three days ago; me pulling, him pushing and both laughing when we stumbled, groaning when we came back together. I was going to take him, bind him to me so he would never, ever even think of leaving me behind again. I was going to make it fucking unthinkable.

Although at the moment thinking of any kind wasn’t much in evidence. Somehow we got through the door and over to the bed; taking stock, I discovered that Sherlock’s jacket was already gone, his shirt buttons undone, his belt hanging open; my jumper last seen on the kitchen floor. Wait. Shoes. Fuck, socks. Skin—fuck, _skin_. The pale length of that neck, freckles showing here and there; the dark thatch around his frankly gorgeous cock. The elegant curve of lower back and lush arse—he could drive me mad just standing there, but he wasn’t, oh, he wasn’t, he was reaching for me.

The broken little sound he made as his hand curved around my desperate, almost painful, erection, his fingertips on the underside, grazing my bollocks—I could only make the same sound back at him. All our clothes were gone now, no more obstacles. I pushed Sherlock gently down onto the bed, swung my right leg over him and put his hands up over his head, holding them so I could see all of him, chest and arms and throat and his luminous, yearning face.

He felt so right beneath me, our cocks brushing and rubbing, his slender hips between my thighs, his bollocks against mine. I knew he was going to feel just as right on top of me. Never in the course of a reasonably varied and jubilant sex life had I ever felt anything to rival these moments of simply touching, skin to skin, drinking in the sights and sounds and sensations of Sherlock aroused and eager, ready for—

Well, for what? “What do you want ... first?” I tacked the last word on, to make it clear that we had all the time ahead of us, for _all_ the pleasures.

His face reddened as he thrust up against me. “Just this. For now. Don’t stop. I won’t—last long. I’m sorry, I’ve wanted you for so—”

I stopped his mouth with a kiss, which brought my belly and chest flush against his, making him gasp into my mouth as I plundered his. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear him; I just didn’t want to hear him apologise. He wasn’t the only one who wasn’t going to last long; why should he say sorry for that? Feeling him as overwhelmed as I was, was the most fantastic thing I could imagine. And I had a _very_ vivid imagination.

I shifted us so that I could stroke his balls, and it wasn’t long before I felt them tighten, his breath hitch, his straining, leaking cock spasm and spurt so deliciously that I was right behind him. My impatient, self-possessed, commanding Sherlock was completely undone by that sudden flood of joy, and so was I.

We held each other unspeaking, just getting our breathing and heartbeats back within shouting distance of normal as we kissed and smiled, flexed and stroked, marveled and savoured and sighed.

He let out a short little sotto voce hum.

“What?”

“ _Killing me softly._ ”

I laughed. “You’re one to talk. And since when are you such an expert on pop songs?”

“I’m really not.”

I waited, but he wasn’t going to add anything to this. “Then how did you—all those songs—”

A half-smile. “You taught me. That lyric site. When I needed to tell you something, I typed the words I was looking for into its search bar. There was usually something close enough. Then I just had to find a match for the date. _That_ part was a challenge sometimes.”

I pulled back. “You did it in reverse.”

“I had to. Popular music is not my area.”

“It was cheating.” I tried not to let a hint of a smile show.

“It wasn’t.”

“It is, you know it is.”

“That’s not cheating, that’s _research_. It’s like using a phrasebook for a language you don’t know, instead of learning the words and the grammar from scratch. It’s clever.”

“Oh, it’s clever, all right, it’s just not _fair_.”

“And choosing a code that was completely alien to me was fair?”

“No more unfair than leaving me here thinking you’d killed yourself.”

Suddenly this wasn’t jokey anymore. The atmosphere had gone from warm and joyful to tense and combative. Shit. I breathed deeply and got a grip, and so did he.

He buried his face in my neck and held me hard against him. “I’m sorry, John. I’m so sorry. I never should have kept you in the dark. I knew it would kill me to lose you, I just never thought—”

Again I stopped him talking, with a kiss. I didn’t want him apologetic, or sorry, or guilt-ridden. Not tonight. Not in this bed. This was our reunion. Our union. All I wanted was to know, and for him to know, that we were a unit, indivisible. It was a moment too—I want to say _sanctified_ —to darken it with blame or remorse.

* * * * *

We talked a bit more, but nothing terribly serious. Mostly we were learning each other in the bodily realm: we were in no hurry to go into what our time apart had done to us, and our time together before that.

There would never be another first night, and we spent it slipping between elation and exhaustion, lovemaking and fitful sleep. We’d always been symbiotic in kinetic terms, with a keen sense of the other’s physical presence. That was only heightened in our present pursuit: to express love, to give pleasure, to experience each other and exult in each other. I had never been so suffused with passion, of mind and heart and body. If anyone had told me it was possible, moreover, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Sherlock lay sleeping beside me when I slid out of bed to the bath next door, and brought back a warm wet flannel—it wouldn’t stay warm for long, of course, but it was the thought that counted, or so I hoped. I uncovered him and made a few gentle passes over his stomach and cock, while he stretched and sighed and hummed.

I had an ulterior motive for waking him. The sight of him earlier, erect and straining, had given me an appetite—and God knows we’d skipped dinner. The light from the bath was enough for my purposes now: I wanted Sherlock sleepy and pliant for the next bit, but I also wanted to see him, ridiculously beautiful as he was.

His voice was low and a bit husky, as he began to register what I was doing so unhurriedly—nuzzling and nosing his belly, the seams of his thighs, the springy hair around his gorgeously quickening cock. His balls, my God, the feel of them, the scent of him. I wasn’t ever going to get enough of him, so I told him so.

He seemed on board with that, having sped past sleepy and pliant minutes ago, and clearly aching for me to _get on with it_ , but too polite to demand it. I’d imagined him imperious in bed; give him time, I thought. He will be. For now it was a delight to tease him.

When I finally started lipping at the head of his cock he was panting, trying to command his breathing but losing control as I slid my tongue around the frenulum and felt a gratifying shudder wrack his body. I played and teased, advancing and retreating, reveling in his reactive spontaneity. When he couldn’t resist anymore he cried out, “John—!” and convulsed and spent, spilled into my mouth and gasped through the thrusts and aftershocks. I’d never felt more aroused at any lover’s pleasure than at that moment.

By the time he began to regain focus I was already coming into my eager fist, and he pulled me up to the pillows, settling his arms and legs around me, whispering “is this okay” and “are you comfortable” as we drifted back to sleep.

In the morning I once again woke up first and crept into the sitting room to email a song request for the coming Sunday evening, for my absent (present) friend.

Then I went into the kitchen to turn last night's shopping into a breakfast as nourishing as the night's exertions.

* * * * *

The morning passed with us only vaguely aware, and very little concerned, that somewhere else an interrogation was in progress. There was such intensity to the thrill of discovering Sherlock in _this_ dimension that I wished the outside world well away.

Before I at least was ready, the outside world was calling to threaten us with a post-interview debriefing. Morstan had, apparently, disclosed quite a few features of interest.

Sherlock sat up eagerly, told Mycroft to come at once, and rang off. Mycroft had ordered us to “take care to be decent, for pity’s sake.”

“It’s that obvious, is it? From what—your vocal timbre?” I teased.

“Clearly. I haven’t been this relaxed since I left London,” he answered. Well, it wasn’t going to be me telling him that his baritone didn’t just sound relaxed, it sounded languorous. Sated. Any idiot could have deduced our changed status from that voice.

He might sound languid, but Sherlock wanted intel: he never could stand loose ends. Neither of us had any idea that Morstan’s story would turn everything we knew upside-down.

Mycroft arrived and subjected us to a full menu of the eye-rolls, insinuations, and ostentatious disgust worthy of a sixth-former.

“Today, while you two were … doing whatever it was that you were doing, I spent six very productive hours interrogating Mary Morstan.” Yet again, knowing Mycroft made me glad that I never had a brother.

He settled in to Sherlock’s chair and Sherlock stood behind mine, leaning over me.

First he gave us the run-down on the night before.

“John, your idea of drawing Miss Morstan here turned out to be inspired. It didn’t leave her or Moran the time to deploy backup around Baker Street; even crime lords don’t keep snipers on standby on the off chance, after all. So, he had to come along himself when Morstan called him from the surgery, and they had to concoct a plan quickly.

“She could hardly pretend innocence with me; we have the recording of her conversation with Sherlock. But because she thinks there are things worth negotiating, she gave up more information than I’d thought she would.

“According to her, Moran intended to keep watch on her from the empty house. If Sherlock showed up, then she would lure him into the line of fire. If Sherlock didn’t show, then she had a ready hostage, to draw him out from deep cover.

“But apparently there had been trouble in paradise: Moran and Morstan’s partnership was fraying. Their collaboration had become competition. Sherlock, your attempt to have Miletić kill Moran in Serbia would have suited her down to the ground, had she known of it: she was plotting how to take Moran down herself, when John invited her here.

“John, if your invitation was innocent, Moran was merely backup for taking you hostage; but if Sherlock was involved, she would allow Moran to kill him and then shoot Moran herself. A murderer would be dead, her identity would be intact, and she would be the sole leader of the network.”

Sherlock was impressed. “She was setting him up to take the fall. And John? He was hardly going to sit by and watch—he was to be collateral damage?”

“Indeed.” Mycroft nodded. “I pointed out that Moran was quite possibly doing the same thing; Morstan would use John to draw you out of hiding, and then Moran could kill you both as well as Morstan, making her the villain.”

I objected. “Then why did she call him? Wasn’t that a needless, an _insane_ risk?”

“Morstan is a confident chess-player, and calculated cleverly. Moran wanted Sherlock dead; in all of these scenarios, she believed she was safe from Moran as long as Sherlock was alive. Because she is the one who had the ties to John, Moran couldn’t dispense with her until you were out of the way.

“If Sherlock were here last night Moran would shoot him, and, inevitably, John. And if it was just an agreeable date for two, she would close the curtains to signal that there was no need for Moran to intervene at all. Strangely enough, she did not consider that John might have handed off the entire encounter to you, Sherlock, leaving himself free to outflank Moran.”

“You said she’s trying to negotiate. What’s she offering? Why should we make a bargain with her, and what guarantee would we ever have that she would keep it?”

Sherlock was asking my own questions. If Morstan wasn’t incarcerated, who knows what revenge she might seek? Would we ever be safe?

Mycroft sniffed. “Well. We lack evidence that Miss Morstan has committed any crime for which she can be indicted, or at least convicted, in this country. All we have is the recorded conversation as evidence of her criminal activity abroad. In a British court, any barrister would claim entrapment and she would walk free. She thinks she's holding a strong hand.”

Sherlock interrupted, his voice bitter. “Just think, John, how much easier it would have been had you waited to shoot Moran until he after he had shot Morstan.”

“And how was I to know there was even a chance he’d shoot _her_? Besides, I only ever shoot people to keep you alive.”

“Even pre-emptively, Doctor Watson?” Mycroft calls me that to get under my skin, the bastard.

“Especially pre-emptively,” I answered shortly.

“Really, John? You shot him before you even saw whom he was aiming at?” Sherlock, distracted by this exchange, looked both scandalised and gratified. That reaction might be troubling, if I looked closely at it. On the other hand, it hadn’t bothered me the first time I shot a man to save his life.

“I’m not going to apologise for it. Go on, say it, there’s no honour among assassins.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “You’re hardly an assassin, John. A strong moral compass and protective instincts don’t sit well with wet work, for pity’s sake.”

I balked at that. “First, _wet work_ is a revolting euphemism. Second, it describes surgery pretty well, especially field surgery.”

“If you two have quite finished bickering—or is that flirting?—did you want actual _answers_ to your questions?” asked Mycroft acidly. “I still have news to convey. And I’d prefer to leave before things get any more ...” The proper word seemed to fail him, because he finished with a sound something like “bleurgh.”

“What else did she tell you?” Sherlock was completely focused again.

“Throughout the interrogation, Miss Morstan portrayed Moran as the senior party; then we played her the tape where she bragged the opposite. In the end, she said that in exchange for _all_ her information—some of it explosive indeed—she’d want immunity from prosecution and enrolment in a witness protection scheme.

“For example, she claimed that Moriarty was never the linchpin of a global organisation. That was indeed all a performance. According to her, she and Moran used Moriarty as a convincing figurehead, but he never was the brilliant consulting criminal. He was coached in that role, and had a certain talent for playing it. That is all.”

“So the Rich Brook story wasn’t entirely false,” I mused. “Always the strongest kind of lie.” Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

“Right,” said Sherlock slowly. “He told me before he died: there was no code. He didn’t need a string of code to break into the Tower of London, Pentonville Prison and the Bank of England simultaneously; he only needed to suborn or coerce a lot of people. A group effort.”

Mycroft nodded, his eyebrow arched. “Which is why Moriarty’s ‘world-wide gang’ continued to function as well after his death as before it, and why you were kept so busy for so long, Sherlock. It was never a single-headed dragon with local overseers; it was a hundred-headed dragon with Morstan and Moran simply extorting tribute from a number of unrelated crime bosses. It explains why Moriarty killed himself; they pulled his strings while he was useful and cut him loose to self-destruct when he grew too volatile for them. The plot to discredit you was probably set up to frame you for his murder, if you didn’t jump.”

With this, so many things fell into place. Sherlock had bought into the notion that Moriarty was his own opposite number, an unstable evil genius obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a worthy opponent. Mycroft had bought into the myth of the universal binary computer code. I, who am not a genius but not an idiot either, was a little perplexed that two such prodigies could be fooled so deftly.

Sherlock told me once that the frailty of genius is that it needs an audience; I never could tell whether there was any self-aware irony to that sentence, the great show-off. But perhaps the frailty of genius is not even ego, but hyper-subtlety: it projects its own complexity on the world around it.

Sherlock was silent, which meant that he was taken aback, re-evaluating everything he’d known or thought, in light of this new perspective. He didn’t need me to point out what it meant for his choices since the roof of Barts Hospital, though he might well need me to pick up the pieces as he came to terms with it.

He moved to the side of my chair, sitting on the arm. “So I was being used by Moran and Morstan to give Moriarty credibility in their relations with their scattered crime cartels? It would explain why he’d be willing to sit in jail for months until his trial. That always seemed a bit preposterous for a criminal king-pin. More like a sacrificial lamb. The trial, the rooftop showdown, it all reinforced the story of him being a King of Crime.”

He would be blaming himself savagely when he looked back at the losses of life, and his own eighteen months on the run, that had resulted from believing Moriarty implicitly. I wanted privacy for Sherlock so he could process all of this.

Suddenly impatient for Mycroft to leave, I snapped, “What are you going to do about Morstan? Will you actually do a deal, even it if means letting her walk free?”

After what Mycroft had done with Kitty Riley, I wouldn’t put it past him.

He shook his head with a wan smile that did not reach his eyes. “We will allow her to _think_ that she has a deal, extract what information she has, and then extradite her to a country I won’t specify, where there are a number of outstanding warrants for her arrest. A country, by the way, which has the death penalty. Steps will be taken to ensure it is applied.”

He rose to go, and Sherlock distractedly waved him off, already deep in thought.

I accompanied Mycroft down the stairs to the street door. I had one last fear he had to confirm or resolve.

Typically, he already knew what it was. “No. It wasn’t your radio messages that let them know that Sherlock was alive. Morstan planted herself in your surgery on a chance, a suspicion—she had noticed the singular run of bad luck afflicting the leaders of various crime syndicates in her orbit. You didn’t endanger him. On the contrary: your warning probably saved him.”

The relief was overpowering. “You’re sure.”

“My interrogation was minute and subtle, if I say so myself.” I could well believe that.

“Thank you, Mycroft. Honestly. Thank you. We seem to have dodged an unbelievable number of bullets.”

“Yes. Well. This _will_ be an end to the Moriarty production, I give you my word. —Good night, John. You’ll know what to do for him now.”

I looked at him with suspicion, but couldn't detect a trace of irony or innuendo to take exception to.

“Good night, then.”

* * * * *

The next few days were subdued but not troubled. Sherlock was thinking things through, but without apparent distress or self-blame. He was so tired, so much in need of restoration, that it was easier than I’d expected to distract him from obsessing too much. Not to mention, I had a secret weapon—as did he.

The following Sunday evening, 16 December, I turned on the radio for the song I’d cued up for Sherlock. It was just a week since his return, yet so much had happened. He came up behind me and pulled me to his chest as a jazz trumpet introduced a duet: line 16 was the song title, “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

The incomparable voices of Ella Fitzgerald (warm and smooth) and Louis Armstrong (warm and hoarse) filled the flat. Neither of us scoffed at the saccharine lyrics, lightened as they were by both singers’ playful scat. Instead, he turned me round to face him and we danced—swayed, really—silent and intent and so, so grateful.

“Happy anniversary, John,” he murmured.

And from then on, it always was. Every Sunday was an anniversary, and those first few were indescribably precious. The Christmastide washed over us gently; it was our respite, and the calm before the storm of Sherlock’s return going public. The following week, the 23rd, he had the radio programme play a Roberta Flack song I’ve loved for years. It had fewer lines than the date, which meant that the message was the whole song, and indeed it couldn’t have been more suited to us. To both of us.

_The first time ever I saw your face  
I thought the sun rose in your eyes  
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave  
To the dark and the endless skies, my love  
To the dark and the endless skies  
  
And the first time ever I kissed your mouth  
I felt the earth move in my hand  
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird  
That was there at my command, my love  
That was there at my command, my love  
  
And the first time ever I lay with you  
I felt your heart so close to mine  
And I knew our joy would fill the earth  
And last 'til the end of time, my love  
And it would last 'til the end of time, my love  
  
The first time ever I saw your face  
Your face  
Your face  
Your face_

We had always shared our space, and work, and meals, and conversation, so easily; that came back quickly. What we were learning more gradually was to share touch, devotion, emotions—and the expression of them. These days and nights alone in the flat were time out of time, both needed and relished for the way it allowed us to (oh, God, _fine_ ) _bond_ , and begin to lose the residual disorientation of the past eighteen months.

After spending our Christmas under the radar, we had an intense moment when Mrs Hudson came back from her sister’s. It had been an unwontedly long visit, in part because she’d been too bowed by prolonged mourning to take any pleasure in Christmas in Baker Street. We heard her arrive on Friday the 28th in the mid-afternoon; we exchanged glances and I said, “Give me ten minutes.”

Downstairs I helped her in with her bags and parcels—she always enjoyed showing off her sister’s just-shy-of-the-mark choices in gifts, and the collection looked promising again this year. She led me into the flat and into the kitchen, and put the kettle on.

I in turn drew her to the kitchen table, sat her down, and gathered her hands in mine. She looked over at me, apprehensive.

I said, “First, I have to apologise. These past months have been so hard, and in trying to get through them I realise I’ve neglected you. I’m sorry. I’ve been very selfish.”

Naturally she demurred: “Oh, John. I understand, I do. We both miss him terribly. And we have to deal with it in our own way.”

Bless her, she truly was a saint at times. But I could feel joy coming over my face when I said, “Next: I have good news.”

She tried to smile brightly, but her gentle eyes looked sad. “You’re moving on,” she said bravely. “You’ve met someone.”

“What— _no_! I mean, not the way you think. It's better than that. You know how we’ve said, now and again, how much we missed Sherlock, and wished he were still here, still with us.”

I tightened my grip on her hands and she looked puzzled, then incredulous.

“No, no, John. _No._ ” She registered from my expression that it was _yes, Mrs H. Yes._ Her stare hardened in righteous wrath, then softened again as her eyes filled with tears.

“You had better not be playing with me, young man.”

From the doorway came that beautiful baritone: “He’s not, Mrs Hudson. He wouldn’t dare.”

I’d always thought Mrs Hudson’s a gentle voice, often tremulous and incapable of real power. Well, I’d thought wrong. It wasn’t exactly strong hysterics, but a scream worthy of a Victorian heroine pierced our ears. And we deserved it.

Sherlock had always been more tender with her than with anyone else, and now was no different. She held him tight and sobbed unintelligible words into his shirt-front, and I left them to their reunion.

* * * * *

Sherlock’s time away ended as it had begun, with a death: Moriarty’s then, and now Moran’s.

Sunday, 6 January, 2013: On his literal birthday Sherlock was reborn to the world. He wasn’t enthusiastic about the date: girding up to _go be Sherlock Holmes_ instead of prolonging our quiet celebratory luncheon in Mrs H.’s flat hadn’t been his idea.

But the revelation that he had been cleared and vindicated had been coordinated among various government offices, including the Met, with carefully curated press releases. And now a media “appearance” was scheduled for 2 p.m. at the very door of Baker Street, to reveal that he was not, after all, dead.

All Sherlock had to do was open the door to the press wearing his mask of infallibility and urbane impatience; be photographed; and answer a few soft-ball questions, these too prepared and communicated to us in advance.

All I had to do was stand by his side, which was always my honour and privilege; look proud; and admire his way of answering a question with a bland insult which landed on his interlocutor but took some time to fully sink in. If Kitty Riley was there, though, I’d be hard put to it to keep a leash on my temper.

In the hallway Sherlock paused to put on the damn hat, and I suffocated a giggle. His hair was back to its usual style, and while I loved it—always had—I was a bit sorry to see the long hair go. It had been a memorable part of our reunion, after all, and I would always find the memory exquisitely erotic. This distracting thought occupied my mind as he opened the door and we stepped outside.

I saw him survey the press dispassionately, but register real shock when he saw his fans. Scores of people, maybe even hundreds, who’d been nearly silent and now sent up a roar, stretched up and down Baker Street. Though it was cold enough to snow they were undeterred, standing there with their breath fogging in the icy air. Holding handmade signs that said _I believe in Sherlock Holmes._ _Sherlock lives. Welcome home._ One or two even said _Happy birthday Sherlock_. He was too collected to betray much emotion but I choked up, and I knew he was affected by the sight.

People loved him, and I didn’t think he knew that.

I loved him, and he finally did know that.

It was the best of a return to our old life and the beginning of a new one. I had quit my job, and he had quit his solitary James Bond existence, with great relief. Once again Sherlock and I would be free to devote our life to examining those interesting cases which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.

But for the moment, the only pressing mystery was what song he had cued up for later, on “Sunday Evening 6 p.m.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, and especially for commenting, here or on Tumblr: there's literally nothing like feedback. All my fics are obsession projects, and you nourish and reassure and inspire me when you let me know I haven't wholly lost the plot!
> 
> Speaking of plot: my generous, brilliant, and frighteningly fast beta 7PercentSolution has a mind like a steel trap for plotting, and rescued this fic from innumerable plotholes and bloopers. That's not all she's great at, as everyone knows who reads her writing. There's one fic forthcoming that is going to knock our socks right out of their sock index: _Just Dance_ , featuring Sherlock and Janine. I don't want to be indiscreet about content until the author says I can be, so take my word for it and go subscribe to 7PercentSolution.
> 
> Do please keep adding your recommendations for favorite Reichenfixits in the comments box. A URL is a blessing, and saves us all time; but fic recs are oxygen with or without them (and self-recs are champagne, and fic reviews are ice cream).
> 
> Finally, about a playlist: I'll be adding a playlist / calendar as Ch. 7 of this fic, so be aware if you get a notification that this Ch. 6 right here is the end of _Sunday Evening 6 p.m._ , at least so far as I know. (Though I suppose I could be dive-bombed by an insistent coda or epilogue, heaven knows fics have a mind of their own.)  
>    
> I leave you with a fanvid that just came out and wrecked me, no pun intended:  
>    
> Scars, by Michael Malarkey; b&w video by Baker Edits 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLGR4_TplIw&feature=emb_logo
> 
> Baker Edits is Dovahlock221 on AO3 and johnlocklover221 on Tumblr


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